


God, Make Small

by komodobits



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Autistic!cas, Engineer!Dean, F/F, F/M, I have never been to Antarctica, M/M, [finger guns], almost everyone is a cool scientist, astronomer!cas, inaccurate depictions of advanced astrophysics, more like slowFREEZE am i right, near-death experiences and threatening situations, slowburn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-09-25 16:58:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9831410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/komodobits/pseuds/komodobits
Summary: The last plane into McMurdo before the six-month winter brings a new face, an astronomer on transfer from one of the inland observatories. Truthfully, Dean doesn't know shit about neutrino particles; he's just the guy who gets paid to move the equipment from A to B and tries to keep it from getting broken and/or frozen solid. Castiel Novak's awkward, endearing smile is an additional bonus. However, the relentless blue night is brewing coldly for a storm, and it's starting to look like Dean and Castiel might be the only ones left out on the ice.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First things first--I am not autistic. Shout-out to [Ash](http://www.ramblingash.tumblr.com/) for supporting me in writing Cas with autism and steering me in the right direction, but if there’s anything in this fic which anyone who is on the autistic spectrum finds offensive or upsetting, please please please let me know so I can rectify it! Thank you also to [Askee](http://www.steeplechasers.livejournal.com), as always, for making sure my words actually make sense. Also Alex, for being cute.
> 
> Furthermore, I hope you're ready for some serious suspension of disbelief. There is a limit to how much advanced astrophysics I can teach myself using only google, so to an extent, any science talk in this fic is like "complicated words??? love lookin' at those particles" and re: surviving in the Antarctic, I'm largely talking out of my goddamn ass and I do not give a single rat's tity. If I wanted to do a load of research and write a story which was realistic and accurate, I would do something crazy like write half a million words on World War Two. This fic isn't that. This fic is for shits and giggles. That said, if there are any astrophysicists reading this and you wanna throw some input my way, I would not say no.

_Oh, God, make small_

_The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,_

_That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie._

\--The Embankment, T.E Hulme

 

*** 

 

Dean looks out at the last sunrise of the year, the horizon bleeding pink and blue at the edges to paint the ice. His coffee steams in his hand, mists over the window. He lifts a finger to trace a lopsided smiley face on the glass, and it is caught at the edges by the ragged black peaks of the mountain, and then there is a voice behind him.

 

"Hey, stranger."

 

Dean turns to see Charlie, still bundled into her coat and scarf and hat, hood pulled up over the top. What is exposed of her face is flushed pink with the cold. "God," she says, with an overly melodramatic roll of her eyes, and she tugs her hood down. "Guy gets transferred to one subterranean spectrometer and suddenly he's too cool for you."

 

Dean grins. "It's not a spectrometer. And I was always too cool for you."

 

"You had me fooled—the amount of extra gizmos I saw you putting on that thing." She pulls off her hat, her red hair flattened and in disarray underneath. "You give it any more settings and it'll turn sentient."

 

"You wish. You had breakfast yet?"

 

Charlie shakes her head. "I had to go check on the solar panels. I'm gonna need to take 'em down before the wind starts coming in." She glances past Dean out the window at the haze of the sun slowly drifting just shy of the horizon. "I figure I can squeeze a couple more kilowatts out of it yet."

 

Dean reaches a hand out to take her hat and scarf as she unzips her coat, and waits as she hangs up her gear on the hook alongside the rows and rows of near-identical red coats. They move then, through the narrow halls to the gallery.

 

It's Dean's third winter at McMurdo Station—Charlie's second—and by now they're used to it. There are one or two new guys who came in last week, before the weather starts turning ugly enough that planes can't land, and they're still fresh-faced and excitable, easily identifiable by the cell-phone permanently in their hand, Snapchat at the ready - _here's what the food looks like in Antarctica; here’s a pile of snow; here's what the sky looks like; here's a penguin; here's another pile of snow._

Otherwise, everything is much the same as ever: the dimming sky, the biting cold, the people filing into the dining hall in laughter and good humour. In the summer, it’s crowded as hell and there’s never anywhere to sit, but most of the staff clear out for the winter to get warm someplace else, leaving one or two scientists in each field to monitor experiments set up in the summer, which means there’s plenty of seats now.

 

"Morning, gentlemen," Charlie says to their table when she makes her way over there, tray laden with greasy eggs, Dean in her wake. "Room for a little one?"

 

"And a big one," Dean adds. "Shift up."

 

Aaron and Donna budge so that there's room between them, and Dean squeezes in, elbows pulled tight to his sides. Charlie finds a space down at the end, tucked alongside Gordon, who gives a grunted, half-awake, "Good morning."

 

"Is it?" Donna says. She jerks a fork in the direction of the canteen window, through which a stretched-thin blue twilight is filtering. "Looks like it oughta be Happy Hour already outside."

 

"Hey, now." Aaron lifts a placating hand. "Donna. It's a beautiful day, the sun is shining, and we're staring down the eve of six months' impenetrable darkness."

 

Around a mouthful of bacon, Meg says, "Will you fucking lighten up, please? Jesus."

 

Dean laughs. "I've already been rubbing it in Sam's face that we get a couple more days of sunlight that his guys do. At least he's got that new lamp—what do you call them? The ones that are, like—"

 

"Oh, the Vitamin D ones?" Alicia says. "Crap, I need to get one of those. Came out in August last year looking like a shrivelled earthworm."

 

"I got one shipped in at the start of the summer," Charlie tells her. "We can share it if you want."

 

Alicia's smile turns wry. "What's it gonna cost me?" she asks, and Charlie grins.

 

Down at the other end of the table, Victor leans forwards to peer past the people who sit between him and Dean, and he calls over. "Dean—you seen the new guy yet?"

 

Dean shakes his head. "Apparently he's coming in on the last flight."

 

Victor frowns. "Wasn't that yesterday?"

 

"Nah—today, roundabout noon." Dean pulls a face. "Gotta go clean up my workshop before he shows up, or Bobby'll have my ass."

 

"In Bobby's defense, I saw you using a fuel cell component as a drinks mat," Charlie says.

 

Dean rolls his eyes. "Traitor." He shovels the rest of his breakfast into his mouth quickly, glancing at the clock mounted over the serving station—he can't afford to be late again—and then gathers up his stuff to head out.

 

He dumps his tray back at the serving station with a lazy wave to Garth, who is still serving fried eggs, and then he grabs his outerwear and goes.  His workshop's tucked away in the Crary Science and Engineering Center, in a different building, which means five minutes of stuffing himself into his coat and scarf and hat and hood, and then he braces himself for the cold and he steps outside.

 

In his first few weeks, Dean figured that eventually he'd get used to it. He still isn't. The cold hits him like a wall, prickling uncomfortably on the exposed skin of his face, the wind threading its way through the furry lining of his hood to sting his ears, and even with the flag flying at Con-3—weather normal, safe to proceed—it's enough to make him huddle down into his coat and walk fast across the packed snow. Ahead of him, the gravel road snakes away, veering out of the base, around the craggy peaks of the mountain, and down; on the tips of those mountains, the dove-pink sky is pinned, washing palely up from ice as the sun drifts below the horizon, never lifting far enough to be anything but sunrise.

 

Dean shoulders the door open to the engineering building, head ducked low, and then fumbles to get his gloves off and find his key-card. Inside, there is a neat row of five recycling trash-cans, each labelled aggressively to make clear NO WASTE BEYOND THIS POINT. Dean shrugs out of his outerwear, wanders through to his workshop, and starts tidying.

 

He gets his workshop squared away—to a standard that would even satisfy Bobby's scrutiny—and he gathers up mouldy mugs to walk through to the office, where their computers and lockers and, most crucially, their mini-kitchen is set up. There's no sign of Benny or Victor, but Dean remembers that Benny was on a late shift checking the hydrogen fuel cells, and Victor's late for everything, so it's not such a stretch of the imagination. He keeps checking the clock, keeping an eye on when Bobby is due to show up, and nearly jumps out of his skin when Charlie appears instead, clad in a thick woollen hat—pom-pom and everything—to sit on the counter-top and distract him.

 

"The hell are you doing here?" Dean complains, swatting at her. "Don't you have a job to do?"

 

"I'm configuring some updates," Charlie says, and picks up the empty tin of Coffeemate that has been doubling as a cookie jar for the last six months. "It's gonna take, like, three hours. Why are there no cookies left?"

 

"Because someone," Dean says pointedly, and takes the tin from her, "keeps eating all the cookies."

 

Charlie raises her eyebrows. "You ought to have a sharp word with Benny about that."

 

Dean sets the tin down on the counter with a clatter, but just as he is about to run the faucet to rinse out his mugs, there is a knock on the door of the office, and he looks up to see Bobby Singer in the doorway, with a stranger in tow.

 

"You decent?" Bobby asks, without so much as hesitating before wheeling himself in. "Dean and—Charlie, the hell you doing here?"

 

Dean gestures to Charlie—something between _see?_ and _thank you._

 

"Moral support," Charlie says innocently. "Dean needs help with the cookies."

 

Bobby huffs, rolls his eyes, and—as usual—decides the best course is to ignore them. "I got a Doctor Novak here to see you - astronomer just flown in from the Dome C observatory. You're expecting him?"

 

"Oh, yeah." Dean wipes his soapy hands on his pants and turns to face them properly. "Sorry—hi."

 

Doctor Novak is dark-haired, red-cheeked from the cold, squinting a little in the glare from the fluorescent overheads. Handsome, if not for the fact that there's something frozen under his nose. He holds himself stiffly, but at this stage it's hard to say whether it's because he's weird or because he's frozen solid.

 

Dean sticks a hand out. "Dean Winchester. I build shit."

 

The new guy shakes his hand. His grip veers towards the uncomfortable side of firm, and he's a big fan of eye contact. His eyes are blue. Like, really blue. "Nice to meet you." His voice is low and scratchy, as though he hasn't spoken for the duration of the flight over and he's a little out of practice. "Castiel."

 

Dean leans in close, frowning. "Sorry?"

 

"Castiel," he says again, louder.

 

"Huh."

 

Bobby clears his throat. “I’ve got to get back to work,” he says. “I’ll leave you to show him around and get him situated. Just make sure he gets to his office okay when you're done with him. And Dean—I need last week's field-test reports ASAP, you hear me?"

 

"I hear you, I hear you."

 

"And Charlie—get back to work."

 

"I'm configuring updates!" she calls back as he wheels out backwards and lets the door slam behind him.

 

Castiel looks between Charlie and Dean, awkwardly nonplussed. "So," he says, after a beat, to Dean. "I'm told you're the one working on my telescope."

 

"Oh, yeah. I’d show you, but it’s not done yet,” Dean says. “I’m still running tests and then I’ve gotta get it mobile—although, actually, now that you’re here, there’s a couple things I wanna run by you…” He leans over to switch on his computer, and as it boots up, he rifles through the paperwork scattered alongside the keyboard to find his blueprints, and pulls up the latest sketch. "Here we go. Okay, so I had to make a couple changes from your specs - like, um. Here. The steel was gonna be too heavy, so I substituted aluminium, but the actual whatsitcalled—you know, the, uh—"

 

"Lens?"

 

"Yeah—that's still all put together just the way you designed it, so there shouldn't be any interference with the readings... and I've reinforced the base with a steel rod so that it's still as physically sturdy as the original design, but the main thing I wanted to change was, like—if you look here,” Dean says, and he holds out the blueprint to show Castiel his crudely scribbled annotations and changes, and then he looks up and sees Castiel’s expression.

 

The poor guy stands stiffly off to Dean’s side, his arms tense, shoulders pulled up tight, and his eyes move over the table with a weary resignation that looks like it's trying very hard to be interested and falling a couple miles short.

 

"Shit," Dean says, and he sets down the blueprint. "Sorry. No. My bad—you're beat. We can talk shop tomorrow."

 

"Are you sure?" Castiel asks. "I don't mean to make myself an inconvenience—"

 

"No way, man. Hell, space isn't going anywhere."

 

"The light-speed movement of gamma-ray bursts from the other side of our galaxy that this hopes to detect might disagree," Castiel says mildly.

 

Dean grins. "Exactly. You've got time for a nap—or an espresso. What timezone is Concordia on, anyway?"

 

Castiel knuckles at his eyes. "All of them, technically."

 

Dean bursts out with a laugh; Charlie gives him a look like he's grown an extra arm. Feeling heat prickle over his jaw and ears, Dean studiously ignores her, and folds his arms across his chest instead. "Um—so, on UST, huh?"

 

"Mm. What time is it here?"

 

"Christchurch," Charlie says cheerfully.

 

Castiel turns an exhausted look on Dean, who shakes out a sleeve to check his watch. "Just a little past eleven in the morning. But I'm pretty sure we're not moving out until the end of the week, so you've got time to catch up." He hesitates. "You want a coffee?" Dean asks, and relief washes openly over Castiel's face. He relaxes for the first time, the tension bleeding out of his shoulders, and fuck, but he's cute when he smiles.

 

"Yes," he says, warmth in his voice. "Thank you."

 

"Sure, Dean," Charlie says, abruptly, from behind Dean. "I'd love some coffee."

 

Dean throws her a look over his shoulder, but she only raises her eyebrows pointedly, and there is a glint in her eye that Dean doesn't like. "What'd your last servant die of?" he complains.

 

"Blow to the head." She gives Dean a sunny smile. "Too slow with the coffee."

 

Castiel huffs out a noise that might be a laugh.

 

"Yes, your highness." Dean goes to start the washing up.

 

"Okay." Castiel wipes a hand over his face, which is less frozen now, more damp instead, as the frost in his hair melts. "Is there a washroom I could—?"

 

"Yeah, it's—"

 

"Just down the hall there," Dean interrupts, jumping over Charlie, and Jesus, he can hear himself—eager and overly helpful and so fucking embarrassing. "On the left. There's a huge weather warning poster right opposite, you can't miss it."

 

"Thanks." Castiel unloops his thick thermal scarf from his neck as he turns to leave, and as soon as he is gone, Dean turns to Charlie to find her looking at him, eyebrows raised, hands on her hips.

 

"What?" Dean says defensively, turning away to start the battle of getting the washing-up liquid to cough up its last into the arid sponge.

 

Charlie rolls her eyes, and follows. "You're so predictable."

 

"What did I do?"

 

"Excuse me, doctor, can I give you directions?" Charlie starts, her voice turned high and simpering, and she leans her hip against the counter beside the sink. "Can I get you a cup of coffee? Can I get you a back massage? Can I—"

 

Dean scowls at her. "Fuck off. I didn't give you shit about that chick who came in on the oil tanker, okay—what was her name—"

 

"Dorothy," Charlie says, with dignity. "And I'm just commenting on—"

 

"—right, so you're telling me if the new scientist showing up was a cute girl you wouldn't be on that like—"

 

"—the tragic scene I just witnessed," Charlie goes on, as she crosses to the corner where they've set up a percolator and a toaster for when they're too wrapped up to break for food. "Because that's what it was, Dean. That was a tragedy."

 

Dean rolls his eyes. "Shut up." He focuses instead on rinsing out the growing mould at the base of each cup, and Charlie fiddles with the coffee filter. After a moment, Dean says, "Anyway, I'm just being polite. He's gonna be here for half a year."

 

Charlie hums in agreement. "Plenty of time to start nesting."

 

Scowling, Dean turns to flick sudsy warm water at her. "Shut the—"

 

"Is this the penguins?"

 

Dean looks back, startled, to find Castiel standing in the doorway behind him with his scarf in hand. He has flattened his hair with water, tried to smooth it back where it stood up at odd angles, and in some places made it worse. Dean is hopelessly endeared by it. Like an idiot, he says, "Penguins?"

 

"Nesting."

 

Charlie stifles a snorting laugh into the sleeve of her sweater and turns her back on Castiel, looking instead at the chattering coffee machine.

 

Dean's ears are burning. "Uh," he says. "Yeah. We get a lot of Adelies round here." He wipes the suds out of the mugs with a grubby washcloth, and then passes them across to Charlie. "So—this your first winter?"

 

Castiel, hovering uncertainly in the doorway up to this point, seems to come to some kind of decision, and he starts zipping out of his outerwear—a pretty good call, Dean would say, judging by the way that the guy is starting to flush pink at the ears and hands in the heated office. He nods, and says, "I've been in Concordia for the past three summers, but usually I leave as soon as it gets dark.”

 

Dean grins at him over his shoulder, shaking the soapy water from his hands. “Oh, you’re gonna love it. By May, we get scurvy.”

 

“Wrong vitamin deficiency,” Charlie says. She pours the coffee, hands out the mugs. “Dry skin’s a bitch, though. If you’re a man who moisturises, you’re gonna wanna start hoarding.”

 

Castiel’s eyebrows lift. “Duly noted.”

 

“You’ll live,” Dean says, and he lifts his mug to clink it carefully against Castiel’s. He winks. “Welcome to McMurdo.”

 

***

 

Dean introduces Castiel to the rest of the team, walking around the building feeling not unlike the security detail for a B-list celebrity— _this is Castiel, the new guy; hey, this is Doctor Novak, the scientist; this is Cas_ —before showing him to his own tiny cupboard of an office.

 

Inside, a bearded, irritable scientist introduces himself—Fergus Crowley, who Dean knows only by virtue of the fact that he loudly brags about having joined the 300 Club at Amundsen-Scott a few years back. Dean calls bullshit. Sam works at Amundsen-Scott, doesn’t know a Crowley, and sure as hell never saw him anywhere around the last couple of the times they attempted the insane challenge of the run from a 200-degree sauna to the South Pole at negative 100. Dean has only spoken to Crowley a handful of times; he doesn’t plan on getting to know him any better.

 

“So,” Dean says, turning to Castiel. “This is your stop. I’ll leave you in Crowley’s capable hands.”

 

“Thank you.” By now, Castiel has thoroughly defrosted, and he turns his scarf over between his two hands. In the harsh, fluorescent light of the research station, he squints a little to look at Dean, and his eyelashes are wet with melting frost. He goes on, “Although I should say that I have very little confidence in my ability to relocate the gallery come lunchtime.”

 

It sounds like an invitation, and the way Castiel looks up at Dean, hopeful and earnest, looks like one, too.

 

Dean leans comfortably against the door-jamb. “Well, I can’t let you get lost.” He pushes his hands into the pockets of his coveralls. “I could come get you at, like—one, or something. Walk you down there.”

 

“I’d like that,” Castiel says. “At one. Or something.”

 

Dean rolls his eyes. “One. I’ll be here at one.”

 

“I’m trying to work here,” Crowley comments from his desk, just behind Castiel. “He’ll meet you here at one. We’ve covered that. Do you mind?”

 

Castiel raises his eyebrows at Dean but says nothing; Dean mimes zipping his mouth closed, tossing the key over his shoulder. Castiel nearly smiles.

 

As Castiel carefully drapes his outerwear over the back of a free desk-chair, Dean leaves him to it, and returns to his own workshop, where Benny is in the middle of welding something, and Victor is, by all appearances, trying to drive an unsharpened pencil stub through his own forehead.

 

Through the window, the sunset-smeared line of the horizon is incrementally more indistinct, swallowed by the encroaching dark. Already Dean can see stars.

 

“Evening,” Dean says, reaching over Victor for his coffee.

 

“Don’t,” Victor says.

 

Dean grins. “How’s the engine insulation coming?”

 

Victor continues beating his forehead with the pencil stub. “Outstandingly.”

 

Dean grimaces. He gulps a mouthful of cold coffee. “Only gonna get colder.”

 

“Yeah, yeah, and don’t I know it.”

 

By the Star Trek calendar pinned to the far corkboard—March: Uhura—there are six days left before Doctor Novak’s expedition ships out. Six days to finalise Castiel’s equipment, run control tests, make adjustments, and pack it all so that it’ll survive the helicopter, the bumpy cross-country truck ride, and the hike.

 

Dean makes another coffee.

 

***

 

He doesn’t mean to forget. It’s just that one thing leads to another, and one hydraulics fault leads to a whole host of other problems, and Dean just about manages to get his head screwed on straight by one-forty-five, at which point he lifts his hands in a triumphant hallelujah, declares to the largely disinterested workshop that he’s a god among men and deserving of at least one McMurdo statue, and looks at the time.

 

“Shit,” he says, cutting himself off halfway through his speech. “Shit.”

 

Victor lifts his head to say, “What?” but Dean has already shoved back his chair and is gone.

 

Castiel’s office is empty when he gets there, mugs cold and congealing thickly on the counter-top. Dean says it again: “Shit.”

 

He doubles back towards his workshop, grabs his coat and scarf and hat from the hook, and bundles up haphazardly, scarf ends left lopsided and flapping. He fumbles for his key card and lets himself out into the snow.

 

It’s picked up a little from this morning, the wind sharp enough that his teeth hurt and his eyes water. Snow swirls in his face, tugging at the hood of his coat, and he ducks his head as he crunches hurriedly over the icy gravel to the main building. It's early enough in winter that the sky still holds some residual light, watercolour-thin and pale and cold; already, the floodlamps are switched on at the side of every building to paint thick yellow squares on the ground and cast the snow in gold.

 

As Dean reaches the outside door, it opens, and when he steps back to allow the others past, he sees Castiel turning the hood of his jacket up. He means to say, _hi,_ or _sorry,_ but what comes out instead is, “I stood you up.”

 

Castiel looks over, frowning, but then he sees Dean at the foot of the metal steps and his mouth tilts a little as though he’s not sure whether to smile. “I considered coming to find you, but I wasn’t sure how to find my way back.”

 

Dean drags a hand down over his face. “I stood you up.”

 

With a hand tight on the rail, Castiel descends the steps, and someone follows him -- goggled and scarfed a little excessively for the conditions, to the extent that they’re hard to identify. Castiel says, “It’s fine.”

 

“In my defence, it was your equipment I was working on—I was running some checks and I accidentally broke something, and I panicked and I wanted to get it fixed and then I looked up at the clock and—”

 

Castiel is definitely smiling now. “It’s fine. At any rate, I forgive you.”

 

“I’m guessing you got lunch in the end.”

 

Castiel half-turns and gestures towards the insulation-padded snowman behind him “Crowley took me when it became apparent that you weren’t coming.”

 

“That was cool of him,” Dean says.

 

Castiel grunts dispassionately but falls just short of an eye-roll, and Dean has to stifle a grin.

 

Dean tilts to look past Castiel, and he waves one gloved hand. “Hi, Crowley. You warm enough?”

 

“Can we not have this charming conversation indoors?” Crowley’s voice is heavily muffled by his scarf.

 

“Sorry, Crowley, didn’t quite catch that.” Dean looks back at Castiel. “Can I make it up to you?”

 

“I’ve heard that most of McMurdo frequents a particular on-site bar in the evenings,” Castiel says, and his head tilts over slightly. “Perhaps you could show me where that is, instead.”

 

Dean nods wildly. “Yeah, sure. Totally. Me and a couple friends usually head over straight after work—is that okay?”

 

“I’m cold, Castiel,” Crowley complains. “For the love of all that is holy, can we _go?_ ”

 

“That sounds fine,” Castiel says, ignoring Crowley completely. “I look forward to it.”

 

“Yeah. I’ll set an alarm. Two alarms. And I’ll put, like, a Post-It note on my computer.”

 

The tip of Castiel’s nose is turning red with cold; his eyes, in the faint twilight, are kind of offensively blue. “That sounds thorough.”

 

“I think I need it.”

 

“You do,” Castiel agrees. He moves forwards as though to walk past Dean, but pauses one step closer to Dean—near enough that Dean can feel the warmth of him and wants, instinctively, to be closer—and he nods. “I’ll see you then.”

 

Without warning, Crowley barges past, shouldering between the two of them, and sets off trudging across the snow. “Come along, Castiel,” he says. “You need my calculations and I’m freezing to death out here. Mush!”

 

The smile drops from Castiel’s face, his mouth settling into a flat, irritated line, and he throws a long-suffering look at Dean, but he does follow.

 

For several more seconds, Dean just stands there, watching Castiel go. His ears are painfully cold, his neck stinging where his scarf isn’t done up properly, but he feels stupidly giddy, and he’s pretty sure the reason his teeth are starting to ache from the cold is because he’s grinning in the snow like a fucking idiot, for crying out loud.

 

He turns, climbs the steps up into the building, and heads in through the narrow, winding hallways to the gallery—mostly empty, now. He hangs up his outerwear and goes in to find a table where Gordon, Kevin, and Donna are busy complaining about the internet speed. Dean dumps his tray down and joins them, and Kevin cuts himself off mid-sentence to watch Dean with wary scepticism.

 

“You’re cheerful,” Gordon accuses.

 

Dean scoffs. “And being cheerful is a crime?” he says, and he reaches across to steal a bread roll from Donna’s tray . He gives them a winning, insufferable smile, and he tries with everything in him not to look across the gallery to see if there is any trace of Castiel still to be seen through the window.

 

***

 

Dean is outside Castiel’s office at three minutes past five, and Castiel looks absurdly pleased to see him.

 

“Hey, man,” Dean says, leaning a shoulder nonchalantly against the door-frame of their cupboard office. “Ready to rumble?”

 

“One moment.” Castiel takes more than a moment to save all his spreadsheets and calculations and write-ups—takes nearly seven minutes—but then he pushes back his swivel chair, retrieves his enormous padded coat, and looks at Dean expectantly. “Where are we going?”

 

Dean jerks his head in the direction of the exit. “Gallagher’s. Come on.”

 

They have a pit-stop before the doors out into the snow, for Dean to shrug into his coat and bundle up warmly in scarf, hat, and gloves. He fishes his googles out of his pocket and then pushes them back, because hell, it isn’t _that_ cold, and then he turns to Castiel, arms held out akimbo.

 

“How do I look?” he asks.

 

Castiel regards him evenly. “Large,” he says.

 

Dean flattens a hand to his chest as though winded.

 

Castiel pushes his key-card through the door and lets them out into the cold. The weather is definitely picking up, and the wind catches Dean’s clothes, buffets him back a step. It stings in his face, makes his eyes water desperately, and he reconsiders his stance on goggles, but it’s too late now. He lifts an arm to shield his face, and with his other hand, gestures for Castiel to follow.

 

“Come on,” he says, his voice faint in the wind. “Not far.”

 

It’s only a hundred feet or so from the Crary labs to the main administration building, but it feels like further. The wind is near-ferocious now, so strong that Dean ducks his head and flattens a hand to the hood of his coat to keep it from being yanked down. The sun lingers lazily just below the horizon, still; it’s been in the same place all day, the light colourless and thin through the swirling snow. Underfoot, snow is building up thick and crunchy, and Dean’s white bunny boots seem to vanish completely. He moves as quickly as he can, hunched down into his coat, and fumbles hurriedly for his key card when they reach the main building.

 

“Come on, come on,” he mutters, his fingers clumsy in his thick gloves, and then—success. The light by the key-pad illuminates green, and Dean barges the door open with his shoulder.

 

“Jesus,” Dean says. He glances up at the TV screen mounted by the door to see the weather code: still Con-3, but only just. He wiggles off his gloves, shaking his hands out to get some blood back into his fingers, and he scrubs a hand down over his face. “It’s not even real winter yet.”

 

Castiel says something unintelligible, and then pulls his hood down and wiggles his scarf down from over his mouth. He tries again. “That wasn’t that bad.”

 

Dean laughs. “God, you’d get along great with my brother—always stubborn as hell that it’s not that cold out while I’m freezing my balls off.”

                                            

When Castiel peels off his googles, he is left with faint pink indentations around his eyes. It makes him look a little like a worried panda. He knuckles roughly at one of his eyes.  "Where does your brother live?"

 

"Uh." Dean pauses as he pulls his hat off, an awkward grimace pre-emptively lifting on his mouth. "Amundsen-Scott?"

 

Castiel raises his eyebrows. "You're serious."

 

"Yeah.” Dean knows it’s weird—the whole family in Antarctica, on separate bases, no less—but it never seems that weird to him. Sam wanted to work at the South Pole; there was no room for Dean there, but there was a vacancy for a mechanic at McMurdo Station. Dean was no good staying in the U.S. on his own, that much was apparent, and at McMurdo, he might still be a thousand miles from Sam, but it’s closer than Kansas. “He works on some of your type shit down there."

 

"My type shit," Castiel repeats dubiously.

 

Dean sighs. He sheds his coat, hooks it and the rest of his outerwear over a peg on the wall. "I figure you'll know what I mean if I, like—bicep? Does that—"

 

"Your brother's working on BICEP-3?" Castiel's face takes on an expression kind of like the one Dean imagines he'd get if someone told him they were related to Clint Eastwood. "Do you know what data they've collected? The impact of their work on the polarisation of—"

 

"Oh, no." Dean backs up a step, holding both hands up between them as a barrier, and he takes off down the hall in the direction of the bar. Castiel follows. "No, no way, I'm not being some kind of messenger pigeon for you and my brother having a weird circle jerk over astrology—"

 

"Astronomy," Castiel corrects.

 

"Yeah, that's what I said."

 

"No, it isn't."

 

Dean's played this game with Sam a hundred times. It never gets old. "Same thing, isn't it?"

 

Castiel's brow furrows in incredulous horror, and Dean hides his grin as he pushes open the double-doors into Gallagher's.

 

In the summer, the bar is packed, every table swarmed with mismatched chairs and stools; now, as winter sets in, the crowd is sparser, and the room bubbles comfortably with a low wash of noise. Dean spots the red flash of Charlie’s high ponytail and makes a beeline for the table in the far corner.

 

“Hey, everyone,” Dean says, coming to stop at the head of the table. “This is Cas. He does astrology."

 

"Astronomy," Castiel says, but his correction is drowned out by everyone saying hello, and so he settles instead for scowling at Dean.

 

"This is Victor and Benny—both engineering, with me. Charlie you've already met. Alicia's one of those shitty geology types. Don't get her started on ice cores. Gordon does weird things with fish. Aaron’s a radio guy; Donna runs maintenance. You might like Meg. She does science things."

 

"Big fan of science things," Meg says with an arch smile. "Volcano things, specifically. You?"

 

"Space things."

 

"Cool. Come on, sit down." Meg shifts up to make room for him, and she props her chin on her fist with an expression of predatory interest as Castiel sits.

 

“Hey, Castiel,” Dean says, still standing as he pats down his pockets for his wallet. “Cas—”

 

Castiel lifts his head.

 

“What are you drinking?”

 

"Oh—whatever beer is cheapest. Thank you."

 

Dean nods, and threads his way through the thin crowd towards the bar. He finds a space on the far end and goes for a handful of salted peanuts from a bowl on the counter-top while he waits for Jo. She spots him out of the corner of her eye and lifts her head with a warm look that isn’t quite a smile.

 

“Hey, Dean,” she says, returning her attention to where she is refilling the ice-box. “The usual?”

 

“Sort of.” Dean rests his elbows on the bar. “Can I get a beer, too?”

 

Jo’s eyes flick up from the icebox to meet Dean’s, her expression politely wary. “Everything okay?”

 

Dean waves a dismissive hand. “Not me. The new guy.”

 

“Ah.” She nods, but now her eyebrows lift as she approaches his end of the bar. “You’re feeling generous, then.”

 

Dean huffs, affronted. “Come on. Can’t a man be welcoming to his new colleague?”

 

Jo tips her head over to look past him. “He the dark-haired one?”

 

“Jesus—stop it. Quit looking at him.”

 

“He looks like he’s doing calculus in his head,” Jo comments.

 

“I think that’s just his face.”

 

Jo considers this. “Still cute.”

 

“Whatever,” Dean says, like he hasn’t noticed.

 

Whistling tunelessly, Jo digs a beer out from the fridge and then starts putting together Dean’s order—one extra-large hot chocolate with all the toppings. It’s a little expensive, but it’s not as though Dean has anything else to spend his wages on down here, so he figures he can justify it.

 

Back at the table, Castiel and Meg are not exactly deep in conversation—a more accurate representation would be that Castiel is rambling, at length, about something, and Meg, with her chin still propped in her hand, looks increasingly pained to be listening.

 

“—such a high level of energy that the gyroradius for each of these cosmic rays exceeds that of the magnetic field,” Castiel is saying, with more animation than Dean has seen from him so far, “which naturally, leads us to assume that they must be extra-galactic in origin—although for this expedition, my interest is in not in the point source of the neutrinos themselves, but rather in gamma-ray bursts whose origins could potentially be pinpointed by—”

 

Meg lifts her head. “Dean!” she exclaims, eyes widening. “Here he is. The man of the hour. Come on, sit down.”

 

“Hey,” Dean says. “Make way, coming through.”

 

“Cas was just regaling me with what his expedition is all about,” Meg says, and she arches her eyebrows. “Mm-hm. Do you want to get in on this? I’ve just remembered I’ve got to go, uh—somewhere else.”

 

Castiel frowns.

 

“Sure.” Dean sets down Castiel’s beer in front of him, as Meg extricates herself from the table. Castiel lifts a grateful glance to meet Dean’s eyes, and then Dean sets down his own drink.

 

Castiel asks, “Is that hot chocolate?”

 

“Oh, yeah! Jo makes the best hot chocolates – you gotta pay extra for, like, marshmallows and whipped cream, but it’s worth it.”

 

“That might have been a better idea than my iced drink,” Castiel says, and he lifts his beer.

 

“You, uh—you wanna hold the mug for a second?”

 

Castiel blinks at him. “What?”

 

“Warm your hands up.”

 

Dean pushes the mug towards him, and Castiel curls his cold, red fingers around the hot ceramic. As soon as he does so, he lets out a soft, slow sigh, and some of the tension bleeds out of his shoulders where he was hunched over with cold. He sways a little in his seat, but there are the beginnings of a smile on his mouth, so Dean considers it a victory.

 

Dean folds his arms over, rests his elbows on the table top. “So where’s home, then?”

 

Castiel takes a moment to reply, seemingly distracted by the heat of the mug. "I tend to split my time between Hungary and my research tenure in Massachusetts."

 

Dean sits up straighter. "You're Hungarian?"

 

Castiel lifts his eyebrows, meeting Dean’s eyes. "Will that be a problem?"

 

"No, I just—I didn't realise," Dean says, impressed. "Your English is really good."

 

"Thanks. I live in Boston."

 

Dean snorts. "You live in Antarctica."

 

Cas tips his head over. "The storage facility I packed my furniture into is in Boston. Also, my cat is in Boston."

 

"Cat?" Dean echoes.

 

"His name is Copernicus. A friend is borrowing him for a few years."

 

“That’s the dorkiest pet name I’ve ever heard,” Dean says. “And I know a guy who called his cat Faramir.”

 

“My sister wanted to call him Sausage.”

 

“Wow.” Dean grins. “Okay. Copernicus is fine.”

 

“My thoughts precisely.”

 

“Dean,” Victor cuts in, leaning over Donna from a few seats down. “Didn’t you nickname one of the penguins Deathwing the Destroyer last summer?”

 

“That’s different,” Dean says defensively. “That penguin was out for blood.”

 

Donna turns to Castiel. “It bit Dean’s leg,” she says, frank, with an expression of solemnity as though reporting that the leg had been amputated. “And then he got in trouble for getting too close to the wildlife.”

 

“It attacked me,” Dean says.

 

Donna goes on, “He had to get a rabies jab.” She holds up finger and thumb, less than an inch apart. “For a scratch this big, which barely broke the surface.”

 

Castiel looks between them, fairly bewildered.

 

“So,” Charlie says, reaching over to clink Castiel’s beer with her own to get his attention, in a topic change for which Dean is grateful, “did you grow up in Hungary, or?”

 

Castiel nods. "My mother still lives in Szeged. I moved to the U.S.  for college—your physics institutes are a lot more prestigious than Hungary's."

 

Predictably, the next thing Charlie says is, “Say something in Hungarian."

 

Alicia rolls her eyes. "He's not a dancing monkey, Charlie. Give him a break."

 

" _Köszönöm a sört_ ," Castiel says, smooth and easy, and his voice is different, somehow, in Hungarian—fuller, less gravelly—and Dean realises, after a beat, that he is staring.

 

"Cool." Dean lifts his mug in a half-hearted toast. "I can sing Frere Jacques, so. That makes me popular at parties."

 

One corner of Castiel's mouth tilts up, and he lifts his beer to his lips. "I'll bet."

 

They drink, and they drink, and Castiel buys the next round, to thank everyone for being so welcoming. Dean doesn’t have the heart to explain that he’s the first new face they’ve seen in eight months; he figures that Castiel will work out just how painfully insular winter in McMurdo is sooner or later.

 

Dean learns that Castiel has three older sisters— Anna, the nearest to him in age, who he’s closest to; Hester, who he argues with, mostly; Naomi, who has a tendency to try and mother him when he can’t get back to Szeged—and Dean tells him about Sam. He tries to keep it short, knows he can be unbearable sometimes going on and on, but Castiel is interested. He says that talking to Dean is easy, and something in his voice makes clear that this is something new and unexpected. Castiel likes Harry Potter and cowboy movies, and has hayfever, which means he appreciates spending the summers in an ice-desert totally devoid of pollen, and then he starts explaining his research. It’s way, way over Dean’s head, but Castiel breaks it down—explains what a binary neutron star is, explains cosmic microwave background radiation, explains microquasars. He gets a napkin and a pen. He gestures excitedly with one hand, and Dean does his best to follow, until he gets sidetracked.

 

“Wait, wait, wait,” Dean says. “So a supernova—that’s a star exploding, right? A really giant star.”

 

“That’s right.”

 

“So does that mean that the Death Star exploding is a supernova?”

 

Castiel squints. “I’m not familiar with that constellation.”

 

“No, dude, it’s—it’s from Star Wars.”

 

“I haven’t seen Star Wars,” Castiel says, and Dean feels his reality implode around him.

 

“You’re fucking with me,” Dean says, sitting back in his chair. “No way. You’re an actual, honest-to-god astrophysicist… and you haven’t seen Star Wars.”

 

Castiel’s frown deepens. Incredulously, he says, “It’s rife with scientific inaccuracies.”

 

“I mean, yeah, but it’s also, like, insanely cool.”

 

Castiel looks at him like he’s speaking a different language. “How?”

 

“How?” Dean blinks at him. “How is it cool, what are you—Cas. They’re knights fighting with laser swords.”

 

“I don’t know what they’re fighting with, but they aren’t fighting with laser swords. Radium-luminescent batons, perhaps, but—”

 

“No, okay, look—I mean, it’s supposed to be powered by diatium, anyway—”

 

“That isn’t an element.”

 

“It is in Star Wars!” Dean laughs. “And like I said, technically you’re not all that far off the mark, okay—”

 

With that, Dean reaches across to take Castiel’s napkin and pen, flips it over, and starts drawing. He breaks down the engineering of a lightsabre to tell Castiel how they work, complete with frequent reassurance that yeah, okay, he _knows_ it’s fictional, he just takes fictional engineering of laser-swords really seriously, and he explains that while there are a couple technical hiccups with the designs in George Lucas’ encyclopaedia, it can easily be amended—and Castiel says the fatal words, “Now, I’m no engineer but—”

 

Castiel takes the pen. _If the shape of the blade is genuinely created not by the laser, but by the electromagnetic field being produced_ , he is saying, and he starts writing out equations, and Dean is looking not at what he’s writing, not at his sturdy, careful hand, but at his face, furrowed in earnest concentration, and he thinks—oh, _shit_.

 

Charlie is never going to let him live this down.

 

“Dean?” Castiel lifts his head to look at him. In the bar’s dim yellow lighting, he is warm, soft; the lamp mounted on the wall behind him highlights the edge of his jaw, the line of his nose. His hair sticks up at odd angles at the back, and his lips are dry from the cold, and Dean is so hopelessly, ridiculously endeared by him that he can’t even think what to say to him.

 

“Uhhh,” he says, intelligently. “Sorry. I’m listening.”

 

Castiel’s gaze moves slowly over Dean’s face as though he’s trying to pick apart something in his expression.

 

It’s a little intense, leaving Dean feeling like something being studied under a microscope; he clears his throat. “You okay?” he asks. “You’re kind of—staring.”

 

Castiel drops his eyes to the napkin, now covered in his small, spidery handwriting. His free hand jitters unevenly against the table. “My apologies,” he says. “I usually get told I don’t make enough eye contact, so—”

 

“Hey, don’t worry about it.” Dean bumps him with his shoulder and he smiles. “I just figured I might have something on my face, is all.”

 

The corner of Castiel’s mouth tugs up a little. “Now that you mention it…”

 

“What? Seriously?”

 

“Whipped cream,” Castiel says, and he points carefully, his fingertip a few centimetres from the edge of Dean’s lower lip, “here.”

 

Dean scrubs the back of his hand over his mouth and chin. “Better?”

 

Castiel is looking at his mouth. “Better,” he says.

 

They're leaning over into each other's spaces, and Cas' fingers are playing distractedly over the neck of his beer bottle, and Dean honest-to-God can’t tell whether or not Cas is flirting with him. He says, "Um," and completely loses his train of thought.

 

Other people hook up with newbies to McMurdo all the time—hell, Dean’s even done it before. The only difference is that Lydia was a confident woman who knew what she wanted and laid it all out on the table; Castiel is a guy, which, Point A, makes Dean nervous because he never really got the hang of flirting with dudes, and Castiel is kind of hard to gauge so, Point B, who knows whether he’s actually interested, and for all Dean knows, the guy could be straight anyway, and Point C, he feels like it’ll be weird to take him home. The station’s accepting as hell, even has it’s own little Pride events come June, but if he slips away from the bar with Castiel, people will notice—because there are less than a hundred people here in the winter, and fifty of them are in this room, so they’ll notice—then it feels kind of like plugging in a megaphone to announce, _be right back, just gonna go blow the new guy_. And now Dean is thinking about blowing the new guy, which is great, and definitely what he needed at this moment of internal crisis. Dean isn’t hung up on being bi anymore but, Jesus, he’s just—nervous.

 

Dean tries it out in his head. _Hey—you wanna get out of here? You wanna come back to mine? You wanna take this someplace else?_ His mouth is dry. "Uhhh," he says, again.

 

Cas lifts his eyes to meet Dean's, a questioning tilt to his head.

 

"You—" Dean loses his nerve. He picks up Castiel’s empty bottle and shakes it, sloshing the beer left at the bottom. "You want another?"

 

They get another round, and then the guys currently hogging the pool table decide to call it quits, so Dean slaps a hand to Castiel’s shoulder and asks if he knows how to play. In hindsight, Dean isn’t sure why he thought anything else would be the case—that a guy with a PhD in physics would be good at pool—but he gets his ass royally handed to him.

 

Castiel is devastating with a pool cue, lining up his shots with careful, mathematical precision, and if Dean gets a little distracted by the infinitesimal shifting of Castiel’s long fingers over the cue, by his forearms and his wrists when he rolls his shirt-sleeves up to the elbow, by the way his shoulders move when he bends to take the shot—well, that’s a whole other story.

 

“God, you’re making me look bad,” Dean complains, as Castiel effortlessly sinks another ball.

 

“I’m not making you look bad,” Castiel says airily, straightening up. The way he moves, now, loosened up with beer and with confidence, is a little mesmerising. “You’re doing that perfectly yourself.”

 

Dean’s mouth almost drops open, while Charlie bursts out with a bark of laughter from the side-lines. Unbelievable. You buy a guy three drinks and suddenly he thinks he’s the king of the world. His expression, as he glances over at Dean, is self-assured, even smug, and, God—Dean is fucking done for.

 

Castiel cocks his eyebrows and taps the side of the pool table with the butt of his cue. “Your turn.”

 

Grumbling, Dean gets in position to take his next shot, but before he can shoot, there is a low beeping. He looks up to see the TV screen mounted on the wall flashing with the latest weather announcement: CONDITION-1.

 

“Aw, shit,” he says.

 

“Goddamnit,” Gordon says, from where he leans against the wall nearby, watching Alicia and Aaron play darts. “I was just about to leave as well.”

 

“Aw,” Alicia says, her smile overly sweet. “Now you have to keep hanging out with us losers a little longer—I’m sorry.”

 

At the table just behind Castiel, Meg snorts. “Con-fun. You’re weak.”

 

Dean looks over at Castiel. “You use the same system at Concordia?” he asks.

 

Castiel nods. “Do we have to stay inside until the white-out’s over?”

 

With a grimace, Dean says, “Afraid so.”

 

Castiel studies the screen—negative twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit with windchill, wind speeds of sixty-two knots, visibility reduced. There’s no indication of when the storm will pass; there’s no telling how long they might be shut up in the bar. They might as well keep playing.

 

Dean nudges Castiel with his shoulder. “Come on, hotshot,” he says. “You haven’t finished kicking my ass yet. Unless, of course, you were planning to forfeit?”

 

Castiel looks over. “I don’t forfeit,” he says flatly, and Dean laughs as he gets into position for his next shot.

 

Predictably, Castiel wins. To say that he wipes the floor with Dean would be an understatement, but Dean thinks he takes it pretty graciously—even holds his hands up in surrender and says he’ll get the next drink. By this time, Castiel’s shirt has come untucked at the back of his slacks; his hair is in disarray, as he has a habit of rubbing a hand over the back of his head as he thinks; he moves around the table with a slow grace to collect the balls and rack them up for the next players as Dean heads back to the bar.

 

At the bar, Charlie, Victor, and Aaron are picking through a bowl of mini-pretzels, and they look up from their conversation as he squeezes into a space between them.

 

“Hey,” he says, helping himself to a handful of pretzels. “What happened to you guys? Thought we were all gonna play pool.”

 

Charlie laughs. "Everybody left because you and Galileo over there are totally disgusting."

 

Dean stares at her, bewildered. "What?"

 

"I felt like if I stayed any longer I would have to fill in an improper professional conduct form," Meg says dryly over the mouth of her beer, eyebrows arched. “You sure you don’t want to get up behind him and show him how to play pool the old-fashioned way?”

 

Dean flushes hotly up from the jaw. “What? Shut up. I have no idea what you're talking about." He sneaks a surreptitious glance over his shoulder at Cas—who lifts his hand in a wave. Not so surreptitious, then. “Shut up.”

 

Jo is occupied with a group further down the bar, distractedly stirring shots into mixers as some guy with a beard regales her with his life-story, but it’s not long before they pay and she’s free. She wipes her hands on her jeans, collects up an armful of glasses to dump in the washing-machine, and then she comes over. “Evening,” she says, and drums both hands on the top of the bar. “What can I get you?”

 

“Can I get another beer and hot chocolate?” Dean asks, rifling through his wallet. “Thanks.”

 

Jo gives a low whistle. “How many rounds is this now?”

 

Dean scowls at her. “I think your line here is, _coming right up, no smart-ass comments here, Mr. Paying Customer._ ”

 

“I just want you to know—you know, for general reference purposes,” Jo starts, off-hand, and sets down a cold beer in front of Dean, with a winning smile, “that when it comes to bridesmaid dresses, I look really good in like, a lavender or a lilac.” She jerks her head towards Meg and Charlie. “I think lilac will look good on these clowns, too.”

 

Meg gives Jo a withering smile.

 

Dean wants to sink through the floorboards and into the Earth’s core. He loves McMurdo, and the collection of regular winter-overs have become like family to him, but Christ above, sometimes he fucking hates everyone living out of each other’s pockets.

 

“Thanks,” he says, handing the money over. “Tomorrow, I’m going to the other bar. Just FYI.”

 

“Traitor.”

 

When Dean returns to Castiel, he finds that he’s relocated to a different table, this one further from the bar. He looks lost in thought; his hands sit on top of the table, curled inwards so that knuckles rub against knuckles.

 

“Hey,” Dean says. “You okay?”

 

“Fine.” Castiel takes the beer from Dean. “How long does a white-out typically last here?”

 

Dean glances up at the TV screen on the wall. The wind speed has dropped to fifty-eight knots, now. “Depends. This one doesn’t look too bad. Might only be an hour or so.”

 

Castiel hums. His hands move unsteadily, knuckles bumping over each other.

 

“Everything alright?” Dean asks.

 

“Tired.” Castiel picks up his beer and drinks.

 

They talk, there, away from the rest of the room, but Castiel is visibly flagging; his responses to Dean’s questions become shorter, and his attention wanders, his gaze flicking across the room. He is fidgety in his chair. He picks with agitated fingers at the condensation-wet label of his beer bottle until they are interrupted by a low beep from the TV monitor.

 

The screen updates to read CONDITION-2: negative sixteen with windchill, but the wind speed has dropped under fifty-five knots, so it’s safe to move around. Visibility still poor. Almost instantly, however, Castiel is out of his seat.

 

“I’m going to go back to my dorm,” Castiel says. “I’m not having a bad time—I’d just like to leave. How do I get out of this building?”

 

Dean blinks up at him, startled. “Oh—hang on, I’ll walk you out.” He stands, grabs his hot chocolate, and drains it in three gulps. He wipes a hand over his mouth, pats his pockets to check that he’s got his wallet, and then Castiel, who has been standing by the table, jittering infinitesimally at the hands, leads the way out with brisk, decisive strides.

 

It’s not far back to the hooks where they hung their outerwear, but Castiel nonetheless walks fast.

 

“Hey, wait up.” Dean jogs a few steps to keep pace. “Dude, is everything okay?”

 

“Fine.” Castiel comes to a halt in front of the hooks and starts shrugging into his coat. “Just—long day. It’s been—” His hands moves oddly, jerking at his sides; he seems to catch the motion before it’s finished, and his hands tighten into fists. “A long day.”

 

“Okay.” Dean hesitates. “You know where you're going?"

 

Castiel squints through the window, out at the swirling white snow, and he gestures loosely towards the door. "Yes—209. Towards the bay."

 

Dean rocks on his heels and pulls a face. "Bay's that way," he says, pointing in the opposite direction. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

 

Castiel's frown deepens. "Really?"

 

“Dude, do you even know which side of McMurdo we’re on?”

 

“The Crary labs are that way—”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“—so the air-strip is _that_ way, which—”

 

“Not quite. The air strip is north.”

 

Castiel huffs. “This is Antarctica. Everything is north.”

 

Dean grins. “Well, you’re not wrong.” He reaches across and unhooks his own outerwear. “Here—I'll take you."

 

Castiel looks over at him, surprised. "Are you sure?"

 

"Yeah, why not?” Dean says, his tone overly nonchalant, like it’s nothing. Like he offers to walk everybody home in negative twenty degrees. He zips up his coat, tugs on his hat and goggles, winds his scarf around his neck. “Hell, it'll fill my good deed quota for this year."

 

Castiel raises his eyebrows. "Am I to expect only bad things from you from this point?"

 

"Oh, yeah, I've been on my best behaviour." Dean reaches out, tugs on the end of Castiel's scarf. "You ready to go?"

 

"Nearly." Castiel tightens his scarf and tucks it behind the zip of his coat; he pulls on his gloves, flips up the hood of the coat, and then, at last, turns to Dean. "Let's go."

 

Dean opens the door for him and together they step out into the storm. Immediately, they are swept up in searing cold, the snow so thick and fierce that Dean can barely see thirty feet ahead of them, and the wind rips at their clothes, threatening to tip them over. Castiel takes one step and his foot slides out from underneath him, and he grabs instinctively for Dean to keep him upright.

 

"Fuck," Castiel says, his voice muffled through his layers. His hand is painfully tight on Dean's arm.

 

"You okay?" Dean shouts, his voice whipped away by the wind. The snow is slanting down hard into Dean's face, stinging at his skin, and he lifts a hand to shield his eyes.

 

Castiel steadies himself. Slowly, he lets go of Dean's arm. "Yeah."

 

"Come on." In a bolt of courage, Dean reaches for Castiel's gloved hand, hangs on tight. "Not far."

 

Castiel looks at him and says nothing. Even this close, Dean can't pick out any details of his face in the driving snow, but he is looking at Dean, and Dean feels his face burn hot in spite of the subzero temperature. Dean pulls him away from the door and leads the way.

 

It's about five-hundred feet around the outside of the administration building, and Castiel’s gloved hand is vice-tight on Dean’s as they move together to find the cable stretching the length of the footpath. Under Dean’s fingers, the cable twinges and vibrates as he feels his way along through the blinding snow; in his other hand, Castiel’s thumb bumps distractedly over Dean’s knuckles.

 

For that moment, in the unsteady blue dark of twilight, the snow and the cold storming around them, the rest of McMurdo and the world beyond vanishes. Dean can pinpoint each of the buildings by the sturdy yellow floodlights, visible through the snow even if only as an indistinct haze of colour, and otherwise it is only the two of them, the touch of Castiel’s hand.

 

At last, there is 209, and there are the steps up to the door. Castiel goes first, with his key-card in hand, clutching at the rail – slips, rights himself, staggers – and Dean follows close behind to get out of the storm. Stepping through the door feels like being tossed head-first into a jacuzzi, suddenly free of the biting wind and the negative-seventy wind-chill and the glass-sharp snow on his face, and Dean lets out his breath in one burst.

 

The entrance to the hallway is only small, trapped between two sets of fire-doors, and in their bulky coats, they fill the space, leaving them pressed nearly chest-to-chest. Castiel's breath is curling whitely from his mouth, and his face, framed by the furry hood of his coat, is flushed red with cold. Dark hair is curling, snow-damp, over his forehead. Dean is all at once giddy with the proximity and ridiculously, idiotically flustered by it.

 

"This your dorm?" he asks.

 

"This is it." Castiel lifts a hand to push his hood back, and it leaves his hair in disarray, all sticking up at impossible angles. He's a little shorter than Dean, but only a little—he might have stand on tip-toe to kiss Dean properly, might not. Hard to tell without trying it out for real.

 

"Okay," Dean says, trying to think of anything except kissing Castiel, how easy it would be. Outside, the storm is dimmed from a roar to a distant shushing as of waves. "Um."

 

"Thank you for helping me find it."

 

Dean is painfully conscious, all of a sudden, of not knowing what to do with his hands. Hanging at his sides, his hands are very close to Cas' hands—very close, actually, to Cas' hips—and so he brings them up as though to fiddle with his gloves, but now the nearness of him has the backs of his hands brushing the front of Castiel's coat. “No problem. Wouldn’t want you to like… wander off somewhere and freeze to death on your first day.”

 

“Thanks,” Castiel says, and then, “I’m going to go now,” and then, “I don’t want to invite you in today.”

 

“Sure,” Dean says, caught on the word _today_ , as if that means— “I get that.”

 

Castiel hesitates. It happens, again, then—a sudden, erratic movement of one hand, swallowed into stillness by the clench of a fist. He says, “I enjoyed myself tonight.” His eyes drop to Dean’s mouth, and then away. He looks through the small square window at the snow outside. “Thank you.”

 

“No, yeah, me too.” Dean rubs one gloved hand over the back of his head. “I really—yeah, I had a good time.”

 

“Bye.” Castiel turns, jostling Dean in the tiny space as he does, and pushes through the second set of fire-doors into the dormitory. There is one small square window in the door, through which Dean watches as Castiel heads down the hallway and up a flight of stairs at the end, and then he is gone.

 

Dean pulls up his hat, tightens his scarf. He steps back out into the storm.


	2. Chapter 2

 

The next day is darker still. Dean wakes up groggy, disoriented, when his alarm goes off; only a few days ago, he pulled down the blanket that he’d stapled over the window to keep out the endless sun, but even with the blanket in place, there had always been crisp, clear light filtering around the edges. He is dry-mouthed, the dormitory heaters in over-drive to combat the weather beyond their concrete walls; half-asleep, he fumbles for the bottle at his bedside. Comes up empty-handed. No bottle—shit. No. He knuckles at his eyes and rolls out of bed.

 

“Up and at ‘em,” he mutters, pounding a fist against the side of Gordon’s bunk on the other side of the room, all of three feet away. “Wakey, wakey.”

 

Under the blankets, Gordon grunts unintelligibly, but it sounds impolite.

 

Dean dresses briskly, finding his thermals and coveralls draped over the back of his desk-chair. He spares a glance in the mirror, but he’s figured out by this point that his hair is a lost cause—there’s no point trying to make it look nice when it’s only going to get crushed under his hat by the time he gets downstairs.

 

“Let’s go, Gordon,” Dean says, and he beats a fist against his bunk again. “I’m not gonna save you any pancakes, you know.”

 

Another wordless noise, this one definitely a _go fuck yourself_ , and Dean leaves him to it. Honestly, the dormitory situation at McMurdo leaves a lot to be desired—privacy, for one thing—and most days feels like being back at college, but Dean gets that there’s not a room for luxury at the asshole of the earth. Gordon’s okay, mostly. Kind of a jerk, but harmless.

 

He shrugs into his outerwear as he makes his way down the narrow concrete stairwell, and shoulders the fire-doors open to head out into the cold.

 

Yesterday, there was enough sunlight left that there was still colour, pale pinks and oranges against the black craggy peaks of the Queen Maud mountains; today, when Dean steps out of his dorm, the horizon is a thin ragged strip of yellow, and everything beyond that is cold, blue darkness. At least the storm seems to have died down overnight. The air is knife-cold but still, and snow has settled thickly underfoot. Dean smothers a yawn into his glove and heads over to the galley.

 

Dean grabs a plateful of everything, greeting Garth over the counter, and then heads over to the table by the window, where Aaron, Charlie, and Benny are deep in conversation, and where Alicia props her forehead in her palm. She’s slumped low enough in her seat that her coffee is only a couple inches from her face.

 

“Morning, sunshine,” Dean says, dropping down into the seat opposite her. “You look chipper.”

 

Alicia smiles at him, and it looks like it takes every ounce of her energy. “Like I got fed into a wood-chipper, maybe.”

 

He starts pushing a fork idly through his greasy eggs to spread the yolk around. By now he’s accustomed to the amount of grease and fat on literally everything served in the canteen—they’ve got to eat a crazy amount of calories to stay warm—but he still doesn’t want to be able to see the oil dripping off it. “I don’t even remember you drinking that much,” he says, off-hand, around his first mouthful.

 

“Well, that’s because you went home early,” Aaron says, and he raises his eyebrows.

 

“Topic change,” Dean announces. “Alicia, tell us about your ice samples.”

 

“Nice try, Winchester.”

 

Dean rubs a hand over his face. “Do we seriously have nothing better to talk about?” he asks, exasperated.

 

Aaron gives him a flat look. “No.”

 

“Oh, I’m sorry—are we in the presence of some internet god who managed to get the Wi-Fi stable long enough to buffer Netflix—”

 

“Hey, easy on the criticism,” Charlie says. “I’m doing my best.”

 

“Max told me how Stranger Things ends,” Alicia says desolately.

 

Dean raises his eyebrows. “Dick-move. Way to go, Max.”

 

“In his defence,” Charlie says, “it did end more than a year ago, so—”

 

“So, how about that astronomer, then,” Aaron comments. “You asked him out?”

 

Dean flushes hotly. "What? No."

 

Benny frowns into his coffee. “What astronomer is this?”

 

“Dean’s astronomer,” Alicia says, and to Dean’s humiliation, Benny lifts his chin in understanding.

 

“He’s an astrophysicist, technically,” Dean says, idiotically, instead of trying to salvage the situation, and Alicia gives a low whistle.

 

“Well, excuse me,” she says. “You hear that, folks? He’s an _astrophysicist_ , technically.”

 

Charlie says, off-hand, "I thought you walked him home last night."

 

"Dean!" Alicia says, scandalised.

 

"It was Con-2," Dean protests. "He couldn't remember where his dorm was. He was gonna get lost and freeze to death."

 

"So you literally just walked him home. End of."

 

"Yeah."

 

"Let me get this straight," Aaron starts up. "The only new face we get in half a year, and he's cute, and smart, and Dean has some kind of unspoken dibs on him. And you didn't even ask to see his penis."

 

"I haven't got any kind of dibs on anyone," Dean says.

 

"Okay. So you're fine with me and him, ah—huddling for body warmth."

 

Dean pauses, his fork halfway to his mouth. "I mean," he says. "I prefer you didn't, but."

 

Aaron throws his hands in the air.

 

"He’s in the room next to mine,” Benny says, not sounding particularly pleased about this development. "He snores. And he takes long showers."

 

Dean shoves his forkful of food into his mouth, ducking his head, and tries very hard not to picture Castiel in the shower.

 

From there, the conversation is mercifully diverted to fond recollections of McMurdo Newbies That We Got With: The Greatest Hits, and Castiel is temporarily forgotten in favour of the glaciologist that broke Aaron’s heart; the radio technician who was desperate for Jo’s attention and couldn’t comprehend her repeated assertions that she wasn’t into anyone like that; Charlie’s brief whirlwind romance with Dorothy, a visiting seismologist. Alicia rolls her eyes and goes up for a second helping of bacon, while Charlie covers her face in her hands, embarrassed, and Dean recites her own words back to her— _a tragedy, Charlie, it was a tragedy_.

 

As they finish up their breakfasts, Gordon appears, groggy and bundled up in a college sweatshirt, to ask whether Dean saved him any pancakes, and then Dean has to tidy away his tray and head over to his workshop. Benny walks over with him, through the gloom and the crisp blue cold.

 

***

 

Dean flips idly through the papers spread over his desk, his chin propped in his hand. “If anyone had told me that being in Antarctica involved so much paperwork,” he says out loud, chewing on his pen lid, “I would have stayed in Kansas.”

 

Benny, at the next desk over, snorts and shakes his head.

 

He has the map unfolded in front of him, and Bobby’s scrawled notes on the expedition outline. A day’s travel to an old base camp – LONG -84.67, LAT -31.68; overnight stay; three days back and forth out from the base camp to six different points on the plateau to set up Castiel’s telescopes; one day’s travel back. Fifteen days’ worth of food in case they get stranded. Their travel permits for the expedition have already come through, as have their search and rescue insurance; Alicia has already sent off the environmental impact assessment forms. Medical data on the people going on the expedition—Alicia’s allergies, Aaron’s bad knee, Castiel’s hayfever. Risk of orthopaedic injury, risk of albedo—minimal, since it’s winter, and there is little sun to reflect off the ice—and wind chill—he has the mathematical equation for figuring it out from wind speed and temperature. There is a whole page on the equipment they’re taking with them, assuring the American government that they know how to use tents and paraffin stoves. Another page outlines their 6000-calories-a-day menu.

 

Dean puts his head on the table.

 

The clock is ticking down towards Castiel’s voyage out into Fuck Off, Nowhere, and Dean is starting to get restless. The telescopes are nearly finished, but he still has figure out a way to safely transport them, and the more he thinks about five days out on the plateau on a snowmobile, the more nervous he gets. Staring at a twelve-page document where everyone on the team has meticulously detailed everything that could possibly go wrong is only making it worse.

 

“You okay there?” To his left, Benny’s voice is laced with amusement.

 

Dean muffles a groan into the paper.

 

He hauls himself upright and manages a couple more minutes of agonised planning before he gives up. He’s just getting himself stressed out, and he can tell that his nerves are starting to grate on Victor, who is trying to concentrate.

 

“I’m taking a break,” Dean announces, and he pushes back his chair, its wooden legs scraping on the plastic flooring. He snags his sweatshirt from the desk—he won’t be going outside, but some sections of the Crary labs are colder than he, Victor, and Benny like to keep their workshop—and heads out into the hall.

 

He goes to take a leak, and afterwards wanders down to the nearest TV monitor displaying the weather conditions outside. Before he reaches it, however, he finds Castiel deep in conversation with someone about thermal radiation or some shit, his brow furrowed.

 

Dean stops in his tracks, and for a second, just stands there staring at them like an idiot, his brain buzzing—he wants to say hi to Cas, but he doesn’t want to interrupt, and he doesn’t know what to say, and he doesn’t know if he should wave and then keep walking, or if he should hang around until they’re done—but it turns out to be moot point. Castiel’s eyes move past his companion’s shoulder and when he sees Dean, his face lifts into a small smile.

 

“Excuse me,” Castiel says to the person he is with. “Can I find you later to discuss the side-effects in more detail?” Then, without any other warning, he is moving to meet Dean, and he says, “Hello, Dean.”

 

“Hi,” Dean says, and realises, then, that he has not planned this far ahead. All he knew was that he wanted desperately to talk to Castiel—not what he was going to say to him, or what they were going to talk about. He says, “Um,” and then, “How’s space?”

 

“Vast.” Castiel cants his head over a little. “Frustrating. Difficult to make any sense of. How is my telescope?”

 

Dean grins. “More or the less the same, to be honest.”

 

The corner of Castiel’s mouth tilts up. “I’d like to see it,” he says, earnest. “if I may.”

 

Dean hesitates. “What—now?”

 

“No, I should get back to work.” Castiel shakes back his sleeve to check a battered watch. “I just had to escape, however, briefly.”

 

 “Working with Crowley that fun, huh?”

 

“Defenestration would be preferable,” Castiel says flatly, and Dean laughs again.

 

“That might be a tough one.” Dean pulls a face, considering. “Not a lot of windows in the labs—plus, the building’s not that tall. At worst, you’d sprain his ankle. Maybe fracture something.”

 

“Which, in turn, would create more complaining.” Castiel tilts his head over. “I’ll have to consider my options more carefully.”

 

“Hey, the dormitories have three floors—that might work,” Dean says, and then reconsiders: “Although, actually, you’d have to invite him back to your dorm first, which opens a whole other can of worms.”

 

“That wouldn’t work,” Castiel says. “He’s not my type.”

 

It’s a throwaway comment, delivered without any particular inflection or emphasis, but it floors Dean. What, exactly, is _not Cas’ type_ —dudes? Dark-haired guys? Sanctimonious British assholes? For all appearances, Castiel doesn’t seem even to have registered the split-second emotional turmoil he’s catapulted Dean headlong into, as he gazes evenly back at Dean. He’s unshaven, his jaw dark and sharp, and it highlights the shape of his mouth, which strikes Dean as just ridiculously unfair.

 

Dean doesn’t ask what Castiel’s type is, because he’s a coward and a loser; instead, after a moment, he manages, “Crowley’ll be crushed, I’m sure.”

 

“Only figuratively, which is disappointing.”

 

Dean snorts. “Yeah. Um.” He pushes his hands into the pockets of his coveralls. “So, we gotta get back to work. Am I gonna see you later?”

 

“I believe so. Thanks to your chivalry, I now know the way to the bar, so the likelihood of my returning there is high—presuming that the weather doesn’t turn again.”

 

“Fingers crossed.”

 

Castiel’s smile widens. “The first hot chocolate’s on me,” he says, and warmth blooms in Dean’s chest, fizzes in his fingertips.

 

***

 

Four days to go, and Dean is terrified that Castiel’s telescope isn’t going to work—that they’re going to haul it out five-hundred miles into the middle of nowhere, cut off from civilisation for a week, and it’s just going to freeze. He runs test after test, and just when he is starting to finally feel as though Castiel’s thousand-dollar equipment might survive the expedition, his spreadsheet of results freezes up on his computer, his open tabs grey out, and everything goes into a melt-down. Dean waits, and he waits, and he punches the side of the computer, and he gets Victor to take a look at it. Benny is the one who eventually says that it’s a lost cause, and he reaches across Dean for the power button. The computer shuts off with a soft wheeze, and when it slowly boots back up again, the desktop is utterly blank.

 

Dean stares with resignation at the stock photo of a flowery landscape, and then he stretches the length of the desk to snag the phone from its cradle and dial an internal call to IT.

 

It rings twice, and then he gets Charlie’s voice, bored and drawling, “Fortress Bradbury, what have you broken?”

 

“It’s Dean. My computer just gave up the ghost.”

 

Charlie clicks her tongue. “Did you spill coffee on it again?”

 

Dean huffs down the phone. “No! It just crashed.”

 

“Have you turned it—”

 

“Yeah. Came back on fine but then none of my files are here.”

 

“Huh.” Charlie hangs up without saying goodbye; Dean pushes his chair back and goes to make some coffee. He comes back with two mugs to find Charlie already in his chair, working her magic.

 

“Hey,” he says, and sets down a mug by her elbow. “What’s the prognosis, doc?”

 

“She’ll live.” Charlie glances at the mug as she touch-types. “Thanks. I think you just got disconnected from the server.”

 

“Can you fix it?”

 

Charlie snorts. “Can I fix it,” she mutters, shaking her head. “Unbelievable.” She hits enter, leaves the computer to barf up a screenful of horrifying white dialogue, and picks up the coffee. She sips, eyes Dean over the rim of the mug, and says, “Doctor Dreamboat asked if you're single."

 

Dean blinks at her. "What?"

 

"You heard me." Charlie takes another sip, hiding her smug-looking face in her coffee.

 

Dean reaches across to grab her. "Wait, no, no, no. What happened?"

 

"He asked if you were my partner." She wiggles her eyebrows suggestively.

 

"And you—"

 

"Gave him a super hard time, obviously." Charlie rolls her eyes, gestures loosely with her free hand as she swivels back in his office chair to check the computer. "Told him in excruciating detail about all the projects we'd ever worked together on until finally, finally, he found the balls to correct me and check that we weren't—and I quote— _romantically entangled_."

 

"Jesus."

 

"Oh, yeah." She grins. "You heard me right. You've got a crush on a guy who talks like a Regency novel."

 

“Oh, man,” Dean says, and he puts his face in his hands. He thinks of Castiel’s confusion at some of Dean’s jokes last night, at the way his face flattened into annoyance when Meg brushed him off. “I don’t think you should, like—tease him like that.”

 

“Dude, I tease everybody, it’s fine.”

 

“He’s not everybody.  He’s—I don’t know. Just don’t give him a hard time for stuff like that.”

 

For a second, Charlie looks at him, uncertain and wary, as though trying to gauge whether he’s serious. Then: “Okay,” she says, after a beat. “Sorry. My bad.” She clicks through a couple of options on the computer, and then the whole thing starts booting up again. The hush between them as it loads is a little uncomfortable, but then Dean’s computer comes triumphantly back to life—files and all. Charlie spins in Dean’s chair to face him. “Badabing badaboom—all done. I’m a gift.”

 

“Merry Christmas to me,” Dean says.

 

“You’re welcome,” Charlie says, and gets out of Dean’s chair. “I hope you’re gonna ask him out sometime this century.”

 

It takes Dean a second to figure out what she’s talking about. “Cas?”

 

Charlie rolls her eyes. “No, Gordon.”

 

Dean tries not to squirm in his chair. “I’m, uh.”

 

She raises her eyebrows. “This should be good.”

 

“I’m—” Dean rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “I’m thinking about it.”

 

Charlie says nothing. She pulls a face as though she might be impressed, and then she flips up the hood of her jacket, which is a little too big and nearly covers her eyes. “My work here is done,” she announces—and Dean isn’t sure if she’s talking about the computer or something else. “Bradbury out.”

 

She walks out, and Dean is left hot-faced and profoundly glad that Benny and Victor were out of the office for that whole exchange. It’s bad enough that half the base is aware of Dean’s enormous, debilitating crush—he doesn’t need to be constantly updating people on its progress, or distant lack thereof.

 

Dean drops back heavily into his chair and stares at the files on his desktop. This expedition’s gonna be disastrous one way or another—either the cold’s gonna kill him, or staring at Cas, squinty and grumpy and dorking out over distant galaxies, will be what gets him. He thinks he’d rather take the cold.

 

***

 

It’s Friday, so Dean gets to shower. At some point in the next few weeks, they’ll get the announcement that they have to cut down from four ten-minute showers a week to only three, so Dean luxuriates in the hot water, allows himself to waste a couple of minutes in sculpting a shampoo mohawk, and a few more minutes’ in staring at the soapy tile and rehearsing _: you wanna go out sometime? Hey, Cas. I was just wondering—you wanna go somewhere, just the two of us?_

The issue with this is that there is so little to do at McMurdo, that, short of bringing Cas back to his dorm and asking to touch his dick, there isn’t a lot that Dean can invite Cas to which is obviously date-material.

 

_Hey, how about we go to the same bar we always go to, only we sit further away from everyone else on the base? How about we book the foosball table later and get a little crazy?_

 

Dean flattens his hair under the spray of the water.

 

When he leaves the bathroom, Donna is waiting outside the ladies’, a weird sight in the combination of her winterwear overalls and the yellow towel wrapped around her head.

 

“Morning,” he says, and he heads back to his room, where, predictably, Gordon is still unconscious. Through the window, McMurdo is quiet and still, dim in hazy blue twilight. There is little trace of the sun left now, the horizon a far-off pale line in the dark, and the floodlights mounted on the side of every building cast the shape of people wandering across the snow as crisp silhouettes.

 

On the way down to breakfast, he has to admit that he does spend the majority of his walk over to the buffet craning his neck in search of untidy dark hair and a bleary frown—because, as Dean unfortunately discovered at breakfast the other day, Cas does not qualify as a morning person; frankly, at 7AM, when the coffee hasn’t yet kicked in, Dean isn’t sure he even qualifies as a person at all, but rather a dark cloud of taciturn irritation.

 

He’s so busy sweeping the galley tables for any sign of Castiel’s uncaffeinated scowl that he doesn’t think to look over towards the tray disposal trolley, and as a result, only finds Castiel when he nearly knocks him and his tray flying.

 

“Shit—” Dean bursts out, “—sorry, my bad—” and he grabs blindly, ends up with one handful of breakfast-tray and one handful of Castiel’s sleeve.

 

Mercifully, the contents of Castiel’s tray are largely unharmed: his glass gets knocked over, but there are only the pulpy dregs of orange juice at the bottom, and his fork clatters onto the floor.

 

“Sorry,” Dean says, heat flushing up his throat, and then he actually processes who he has nearly bowled over. He says, “Cas,” meeting his eyes, and witnesses up-close the moment when Castiel’s flat-mouthed, tight-jawed expression of the righteously pissed-off softens, just a little, at the edges. He is unshaven, unkempt, frowning, and stupidly handsome.

 

“Watch where you’re going,” Castiel grumbles, but there’s no real anger in his words. Dean realises, belatedly, that he is still holding Castiel’s tray—and his arm. Castiel’s sweatshirt is rolled up to the elbows, his forearm bare and warm and, God, but he has nice arms.

 

Dean lets go abruptly, takes a neat step backwards. He says, “Hi—you okay?”

 

“You mean aside from being knocked over at breakfast?” Castiel asks, and his eyebrows lift. “Fine. I’m unhurt, and nothing is broken.”

 

“Phew.” Dean stoops to retrieve Castiel’s fallen cutlery, and then he takes Castiel’s tray from him, and returns it safely to the tray disposal trolley. He takes a deep breath, his back still turned so he won’t bottle out while looking at Castiel’s ridiculous, grouchy face and— “Not the way I wanted to sweep you off your feet.”

 

He says it into silence. When he turns back around, Castiel is still looking at him, squinting quizzically.

 

“Well,” Castiel says haltingly, “I remained upright regardless.”

 

Dean’s mouth works, open and closing. “Yeah,” he says, after a beat. “I guess.”

 

Castiel’s eyes move slowly over Dean’s face, his scrutiny intense and a little uncomfortable.

 

“Um,” Dean says, fumbling for a topic change. “Are you okay to come by today and check on the telescope?”

 

“I’d like that.”

 

“I can talk you through how it works and make sure you’re happy with it.”

 

“Yes—I’d be grateful for the opportunity to familiarise myself with it.”

 

Dean looks at him—at the soft curve of his lower lip, at the crease of his brow where his frown hasn’t quite eased, at the blue of his eyes—and he takes a cheap shot. “Oh, yeah, you can get familiar, alright.”

 

“Jesus Christ, Dean.” The voice behind Dean, loud and bored, is Meg’s. “Can I just get my fucking eggs, please?”

 

Dean’s face is burning. He steps out of the way off the passage to the buffet until his back is nearly pressed to the wall, and he thinks that it would be ideal if he could just keep going, melt into the concrete and never be seen again—because on top of Meg having heard his blunder, and her withering look that lets him know exactly how pathetic that line was, it goes over Castiel’s head anyway.

 

“Thank you,” Castiel says, and he smiles. “I appreciate it.”

 

He says goodbye, then—to Meg and to Dean—before leaving, retrieving his outerwear from a hook on the wall by the door, and Dean is left to skulk, humiliated, along the buffet behind Meg. Thankfully, Meg says nothing; she’s kind of an asshole, sometimes, but in this instance, it seems to work in Dean’s favour, as they aren’t close enough for her to try any teasing bullshit.

 

In the time it has taken to Dean to get his breakfast—although, admittedly, with a detour via Castiel—the weather has turned. The monitor mounted in the corner of the galley emits a long beep and flashed up with CONDITION-2. Dean studies the temperature, wind-speed, wind-chill, and then glances out of the window on the far side of the galley. It’s dark out, the morning black and blue, so there is little to see anyway, but the distant yellow lights of floodlamps mounted on the Crary labs are fragmented and fogged out by the swirling snow. The wind is a hushed rumble through the thick concrete walls, but the distant sound of it makes Dean hunch his shoulders as he eats, in anticipation of the cold.

 

***

 

Before Dean’s lunch-break, Castiel appears, significantly more awake than the last time Dean saw him, and together they go through the equipment that Dean has set up for their expedition.

 

Dean tells him how it works, shows him the readings from his test-runs, lets him fiddle with the dials to set it up the way that he wants; he answers his questions, and Cas reviews the blueprints and design specifications with a muted excitement betrayed in the restless way he rocks a little on his feet.  He talks, at length, about his hypotheses, and about gamma rays suggesting astrophysical sources of neutrinos in addition to the sun and to supernova which could be pinpointed by readings in the ice, and Dean is a little lost, to tell the truth—he still gets electrons and protons mixed up half the time—but he is caught up in Castiel’s voice and the movement of his hands and the near-feverish love in his every word.

 

After a point, Dean realises that Victor has pushed back his chair and half-turned, watching the exchange with amusement, his chin propped in his hand, and Benny comes in to gather up some paperwork that he left on his workbench, but takes a suspiciously long time about it, his eyes on Castiel.

 

“—and so this supposed dark-matter particle must be neutral and must interact weakly with ordinary matter—which, of course, makes it difficult to detect—but neutrinos certainly can’t make up the entirety of this hypothesised cosmic dark matter, as a colleague of mine at Concordia took part in experiments regarding the nuclear decay of—”

 

There is a clear knock on the door of the workshop, and then Bobby Singer wheels himself in. Victor clears his throat, and turns back to his own work; Benny starts shuffling through his paperwork, but Castiel, seemingly oblivious of the interruption, keeps going, until Dean reaches a hand towards him. “Cas—Cas, hey, just one second,” he says.

 

Castiel’s mouth snaps shut.

 

“What’s up, Bobby?” Dean asks, turning.

 

Bobby’s gaze moves between Dean and Castiel, appraising. “Am I interrupting?” he asks, in a tone that conveys pretty clearly how little of a shit he gives about whether he is or not.

 

Dean can feel Castiel’s eyes on his face, and he remembers Meg’s desperation to free herself from Castiel’s animated astrophysics rambling, the way Castiel’s face fallen. He says, “I mean, me and Cas can resume this later. What do you need?”

 

Bobby points at the telescope components behind them. “You do realise you go on expedition in three days, and that hunk of junk’s not insured, right?”

 

Dean winces. “I have the form ready on my desk?” he tries, hopeful, and not exactly honest, either.

 

It doesn’t impress Bobby. “That’s great, buttercup. How about getting it ready on our insurer’s desk, two weeks ago?”

 

“I’m on it.”

 

“You light a goddamn fire under it, Dean. Whatever the hell this is—” Bobby says, waving dismissively at the room at large, but with his eyes fixed in particular on Castiel, where he stands by the workbench, “this can wait.”

 

“Aye, aye, captain,” Dean says, just barely restraining an eye-roll.

 

Bobby throws him a sharp look. “Shut the hell up. And Benny—”

 

Benny holds up a handful of the papers that he’s been rifling through for the past few minutes. “Got it here, with you in five.”

 

Bobby wheels his chair further into the room and holds his hand out for the paperwork, and as Dean realises that this is about to turn into an impromptu team meeting, he lifts his head and meets Castiel’s eyes. He wants to apologise—wants to say he’d much rather talk to Cas, even about cosmic dark whatever—wants to say that he hopes he’ll see him later and that maybe one day they could even hang out just the two of them—but he doesn’t say any of it. He is still figuring out how to cut over Bobby and let Castiel know that he should probably just go, but he doesn’t get a chance.

 

Castiel understands before Dean says anything. “I’ll go,” he says. “Thank you, Dean, for showing me how everything works. I’ll see you later. Benny, Victor—nice to see you.”

 

Victor calls, _later_ , across the room; Benny half-grunts. Castiel nods at Bobby, as well, but the look he turns on Dean is soft and grateful and makes Dean’s ears hot, and then he leaves.

 

Once Castiel is gone, Bobby talks them through the stages of their various projects, reams them out for not doing enough/not doing it fast enough, reminds them of the need to make sure all the McMurdo vehicles are properly winterised ASAP, and by the end of it, Dean has a to-do list on a chain of Post-It notes as long as his arm.

 

He doesn’t leave the office for the rest of the day. His only reprieve from the workload is the brief game of trashcan basketball he plays with Victor with their discarded plans and reports—a game that Dean is confident he would have won, for once, had Benny not walked past and effortlessly swatted Dean’s balled-up trash out of the air in the middle of its perfect trajectory towards the can. He finishes his paperwork for the expedition. He doesn’t see Castiel again.

 

There’s no sign of Castiel at dinner, either, when they are finally free to go and get food, and Dean stifles his disappointment. He eats his pepperoni pizza and half-listens to Aaron complaining how the weather being temperamental means that keeping the radio signal steady is a nightmare, and Alicia waves a hand in front of his face to bring him back into the reality.

 

“Earth to Dean,” she says gently. “You okay there?”

 

Dean blinks, startled, and lifts his head. “Yeah—fine. Aaron,” he says, looking down the table. “You think the weather is gonna be good enough to go down the Sound tomorrow?”

 

Aaron arches his eyebrows. “Are you asking me on a date?”

 

“What?” Dean frowns. “No, just—do you think it’s gonna be clear out, or—”

 

“I’m a radio technician,” Aaron says. “Not a meteorologist.”

 

Dean huffs.

 

He shovels the rest of his dinner down, excuses himself, clears his tray away, and heads across to Building 209. The cold, when he steps outside, hits him like a punch, the wind fast and fierce enough that it sends him reeling back a step and slams the door tightly shut as soon as Dean is through it. The snow is worse that it appears through the foggy galley windows, frigid and sharp and searing the skin of Dean’s cheeks where a sliver of them is exposed between his goggles and his scarf; he tucks his chin into his chest, his head low, and he pushes on through the storm.

 

It’s not far to 209, but it feels like miles, and with every slow, trudging step through the snow, Dean can only think _, I signed up to five days of this. I volunteered to spend the best part of a week on a winter field expedition_. The thought makes dread curl in his gut—God, it’s going to be cold—but by then, he is stumbling up the steps into 209.

 

The hall inside is narrow, a little musty, but blissfully warm and free of the wind. Castiel’s room is up on the third floor—room 304, if Dean remembers correctly. Dean takes the stairs slowly, his brain bouncing agitatedly around in his skull as he goes over what he’s going to say, and during that slow ascent, he unzips his heavy coat, takes off his hat and goggles, tries to fix his hair with a hand.

 

By the time Dean reaches 304, he is starting to overheat, and his face is warm. He can tell, just from glancing at his hands, that he is starting to go pink, and he hovers nervously for a second in the hall. He takes a deep breath, stows his gloves, hat, and goggles in the deep pocket of his coat, runs a hand over his hair again. He touches his knuckles just briefly to his jaw—fuck, he’s warm. He tugs at the collar of his sweatshirt and glances resentfully at the radiator glugging at full strength on the wall behind him.

 

Down the hall, someone clears their throat, and Dean looks over to see Benny lounging against his door-frame, looking pretty amused.

 

Dean shoos him with a hand, and he knocks.

 

Inside, there are voices: "— _semmi sem fog történni. Kint mínusz negyven fok van, ez így elég hangulatromboló._ " Hungarian, Dean figures, unless Castiel has a bunch of other languages tucked up his sleeve. Dean knocks again. " _Különben is biztos vagyok benne, hogy ő— szia?_ Hello?"

 

"Hey," Dean calls through the door. "It's me. Dean."

 

Castiel's voice floats back. "Come in."

 

Dean opens the door hesitantly and hovers in the doorway. "Hey."

 

Castiel’s room is large—he has one of the double rooms that usually visiting couples pay a hefty deposit for—and surprisingly untidy. Dean tries hard to avoid looking at the unmade bed or the balled up laundry on the floor; he pushes his hands into the pockets of his coat and stares at his bunny boots. Castiel has his back turned, facing his laptop where it sits on his desk. He speaks to the laptop—"Just one second,"—and then swivels to turn around. For a second, his eyes flicker to the mess in the room, assessing, but ultimately does nothing about it. "Hello, Dean."

 

"Hey, don't switch languages by my account. You talking about me?" he jokes.

 

The woman on-screen - slim, red hair pulled back into a ponytail, heavily pixelated - laughs. " _Épp olyan okos, mint amilyen cuk."_

 

Castiel glances at the laptop. _"Fogd már be."_

 

"Hi!" The woman waves at Dean.

 

Dean waves back, feeling sort of like an idiot. "Hi—Hester?"

 

"Anna."

 

"Sorry. I'm Dean."

 

"Oh, I know."

 

Dean glances at Cas, who looks studiously back at Dean as though oblivious, his expression giving nothing away. "Is everything alright, Dean?"

 

"Yeah, yeah, I was just wondering if you wanted to—um. If you wanted—" Dean hesitates, and in that pause, totally loses every iota of courage that he’d summoned on the way up the stairs. "If you wanted the telescope units to be hand-held and easily portable, or if you're planning to do everything with someone to assist you."

 

Castiel sits back in his seat. "We're going to have to survey a few miles so we'll have a vehicle anyway for traversing the different spots, but testing the ice will be much more straight-forward if the equipment is manageable by a single person.”

 

"Noted."

 

From the laptop, Anna says, in English, "You hear that? He came to ask about your equipment."

 

Without looking away from Dean, Castiel reaches across and mutes her.

 

"Sorry—am I causing a problem?" Dean asks, glancing between Castiel and the laptop. "I don't wanna interrupt—"

 

"Absolutely not."

 

"Okay. I was also, uh." Dean picks at the paint peeling from the doorframe. "You weren't at dinner. I know sometimes you wacky science types get all caught up and don't eat, so I thought I'd—"

 

"That's kind of you," Castiel says.

 

Dean fights the urge to roll his eyes. Fucking _kind_ of him. Okay. "I mean. So you're fine?"

 

"Yes, everything's alright—I just wanted to talk to my sister. This is the only time that is convenient for her."

 

"Okay. Yeah, I know that feeling. Me and Sam gotta call at crazy times." The conversation trails off a little, and Dean is conscious of Castiel's laptop, his sister waiting—and listening—on the end of the line. "Uh," he says. "You." He loses heart and doesn't say it.

 

"I—?"

 

Dean rubs his thumb over a clump where the paint was laid on too thick. He steels himself, avoids Castiel's eyes. "You ever been to see Vince's Cross?"

 

"No. Is it far?"

 

"Nah. Twenty-minute walk. Two, three minutes if we drive down. It's cool. Plus, you can sometimes see seals and shit.” Dean scrapes the toe of his boot over the cheap, scratchy carpet, not looking up. “I dunno if you wanna go tomorrow?"

 

"I'd love that." Castiel’s voice is soft, warm, and it has the tips of Dean’s ears burning again, but it gives him the confidence to lift his head, and he feels a hundred per cent more hot and flustered when he sees Castiel’s smile, small and bright and totally devastating for Dean’s sense of composure.

 

"Cool. Cool.” Dean’s mouth is broken, apparently. “Yeah, cool. Um. Cool.” Dean would kill to remember how to say another word other than _cool_ right this fucking second. “I figure if I ask enough people, we can get a truck down and then we don't need to walk."

 

Something flickers in Castiel's expression, and Dean replays the sentence in his head—ah, _fuck_. He needs to try that again.

 

"That sounds like a good idea," Castiel says haltingly. "A group outing will be—"

 

"Yeah. I mean, if we—we could." Dean is humiliating himself. "If you wanted to. Just us. Uh." For fuck's sake. Castiel is staring at him, a frown pulling at his brow in confusion, and Dean gives up. "Cool. I'll let you know when we could—whenever you're free. I know you have, like... particles to look at."

 

Castiel's mouth lifts into a smile. "The particles aren't going anywhere.”

 

“Oh, yeah?” Dean challenges, and he can feel his own mouth tilting up into an embarrassing echo of Castiel’s smile, beyond his control. “What about your light-speed gamma things?”

 

When Castiel laughs, the corners of his eyes crease up, and his grin is gummy and dorky and ridiculous. Dean wants to go on making him laugh indefinitely. “Good point,” Castiel says. “So what time should I meet you tomorrow?”

 

“Um—how’s nine A.M?”

 

“Early,” Castiel says bluntly.

 

“Early?” Dean echoes. “It’s—”

 

“It’s a Saturday.”

 

“It’s a two-hour lie-in, dude,” Dean says, but Castiel is stubborn and uncompromising. “Ten?”

 

“Eleven.”

 

"Eleven," Dean says. "I can do eleven. Okay. Cool. Cool."

 

"Cool," Cas repeats, his mouth still tipped into that dorky half-smile.

 

"I'll—yeah, I'll see you later, then." Dean drums both hands, a little awkwardly, on the door-frame. "Okay. See you—see you, Anna."

 

On Cas' laptop screen, Anna's mouth moves to respond, but she is still muted, and Dean doesn't catch it, so he settles instead for a two-handed wave as he backs out of the room, and he goes. Just before the door closes, Cas' voice picks up again—low, furtive, and irritated in rapid Hungarian—over tinny laughter.

 

***

 

When Castiel appears, bundled up warm with an orange hat, to meet Dean at eleven o’clock the next day, the first thing he says is, “Where’s everybody else?”

 

“Uh. No-one else is coming.” Dean clears his throat. “I didn’t actually—ask anybody else. Just you.”

 

“Oh.” Castiel studies him, brow furrowed. “Okay.”

 

The scrutiny makes Dean squirm in his boots; he shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his coat, and then he tilts over to nudge Castiel’s side with his elbow. “Come on,” he says. “You ready to go?”

 

Together they walk down to where the maintenance trucks are parked, one of which Donna has generously lent them for the day. It’s an old truck, doesn’t even have electric locks, and Dean opens Castiel’s door for him first. Inside, the truck is freezing, and when Dean turns the engine over, there are a bracing few minutes when the heating vents only blast cold air into their faces, but it soon warms up as Dean pulls out of McMurdo and onto the highway down to the Sound.

 

Castiel is a quiet passenger, his elbow propped on the windowsill; he stares out of the window at the black slopes of the mountains, the heaps of snow at either side of the salted gravel. It’s a clear day, stars pinpricking the open sky, and the scarce light afforded from the horizon and the sliver of moon is thin, dimly blue. The headlamps of the truck are thick, butter-yellow in the half-light, and when they turn the next corner, the ravine of gravel drops away to reveal the white expanse of the ice shelf to their left.

 

Beside Dean, Castiel lifts his head at the sight.

 

“Nearly there,” Dean says, glancing over at him. “Bundle up.”

 

He pulls over, parks the truck at what could pass for the hard shoulder on a real road, and he takes a second to wrap up warm, zipping up his coat. Castiel gets out of the car first, standing on the edge of the slope, looking towards the horizon as Dean finds his hat and gloves.

 

Once bundled up in enough layers to ward enough the sub-zero temperatures—even on this clear, Condition-3 day--they pick their way down the uneven gravel path to the ice shelf, which stretches whitely halfway to the horizon, glimmering faintly in the thin light.

 

Castiel points. "Look!"

 

Dean follows the direction of his finger and laughs. "Oh, shit, yeah. You wait 'til summer, they'll be hanging out on the runway."

 

The Adelie penguins are standing around in awkward clumps, unmoving. Occasionally, one will shimmy its wings and settle again; it's a cold morning, and they don't seem inclined to put in much effort.

 

"They come that close?" Castiel asks.

 

"Yeah. Never seen enough people to figure out to be afraid of us. You never seen 'em before?"

 

"Only briefly, on my way in. Dome C was too far inland," Castiel says, and he stands with his hands in his pockets, studying them. "Can we get closer?"

 

"Five metres is as close as we can get. But if you make yourself real small they sometimes wander over." Dean looks over at Castiel, catches his eye, and winks. "Loophole."

 

Castiel doesn't need any further encouragement. He moves with decisive steps down the slope towards them, leaving Dean to follow at an unsteady half-jog in order to catch up. Their boots crunch over the ice and stone as they climb down to the ice-shelf, and then they pick their way carefully across towards the penguins. The ice is already thick enough to walk on in early winter, but Dean keeps an eye out regardless for cracks or for seals’ breathing holes.

 

Up ahead, Castiel comes to a halt. He studies the penguins, brow furrowed, as they yawn and stretch and shuffle. He says, off-hand, “Do you see Deathwing the Destroyer anywhere?”

 

Dean snorts. “Hard to tell,” he says, and he lifts a hand to shield his eyes, looking across the penguins scattered on the ice. “It all happened so fast. You think any of those guys look hungry for flesh?”

 

Castiel hums, thoughtful. He points. “That one seems fairly bloodthirsty.”

 

Dean looks over. The penguin in question honks, and slips on the ice, teetering like a wobble toy. “Nah,” Dean says, grinning. “He’s got a crazed look in his eyes for sure, but he’s no Deathwing.”

 

The corner of Castiel’s mouth tilts up, wry. “Grievious Bodily Harm-wing, perhaps.”

 

Dean bursts out with a laugh. “Tax Evasion-wing.”

 

Castiel drops into a crouch, settling his elbows on his knees, and he hunches his shoulders down, tries to make himself small and approachable. From five metres away, the nearest Adelies lift their heads, equal parts suspicious and inquisitive. One makes an odd, rattling squawk, and shuffles slowly away; another makes slow, clumsy steps towards Castiel, its wings held out akimbo for balance.

 

Castiel says, “Hello. I’m friendly.”

 

“Yeah, but he’s not. Look at that thing.” Dean says, and he makes a show of taking one large step back, away from Castiel and the approaching penguin. “You’re taking your life into your own hands here, man.”

 

“He won’t hurt me,” Castiel says, his voice low and gentle. “Hello.”

 

The penguin pauses, cocks its head.

 

“It was nice knowing you,” Dean says. “He’s gonna go for your eyes.”

 

Castiel shushes him, staying small and quiet, and he drops his eyes to the ice as the penguin waddles within arms’ reach. It makes a tiny squawking noise, stretches his head towards Castiel. Up this close, Dean realises just how tiny the Adelies are, its smooth dark head probably only just past Dean’s knee, but it doesn’t seem at all frightened.

 

Castiel holds perfectly still as the penguin leans forwards, sniffs hesitantly at the sleeve of his jacket, at his glove. Without moving, Castiel’s eyes lift to meet Dean’s, his smile wide and gummy. The penguin headbutts his elbow, and Castiel’s face lights up. The thin blue glow where the sun's rays still catch below the horizon makes Cas' eyes bluer than ever. Dean can feel his mouth pull involuntarily into a smile.

 

For several minutes, Castiel stays motionless, letting the penguin nudge curiously into him, until eventually it gets bored. It honks, loud and ugly, near Castiel’s ear, and then turns and waddles away, towards where the rest of the penguins are watching with distracted half-interest. Tax-Evasion-wing yawns dismissively—or, at least, Dean thinks it’s the same penguin. Truthfully, they’re all identical.

 

Castiel straightens, and his hands move restlessly at his sides.  “That was—cool,” he says, and he is still smiling. He is flushed with the cold and still smiling, and he has pushed his hat back from his forehead, leaving dark hair curling up, gravity-defiant, from his face, and when he looks over at Dean, his expression is soft. It lifts embarrassed warmth along Dean's jaw and ears, and he ducks his head.

 

"Come on," he says, clearing his throat. "We oughta move along."

 

They trudge up the steep swell of black rock to the top, where Vince’s Cross juts, tall and dark, upwards to pierce the greying sky. Winter is new enough that the snow has not yet settled heavy on the slope, but the ground is crusted with stubborn frost, making it a little slippery underfoot. At one point, Dean’s foot slips out from under him, and he is righted by Castiel’s hand on the small of his back, steadying. Dean grunts out an embarrassed _thanks_ without turning around, his ears burning under his woollen hat and the fur of his hood.

 

At the top, they have a clear view across the ice-shelf, gleaming white and massive, and beyond, to the dark stripe of the ocean. In the raw twilight, the ice doesn’t glitter brightly enough that they need their goggles on, but it’s still breath-taking. Castiel sways a little where he stands, tilts his head up to take it all in.

 

“Pretty cool, huh?” Dean says. “In the summer, you can see whales and all kinds of cool stuff like that.”

 

“Who’s Vince?” Castiel asks.

 

“Some guy who fell off the cliff and drowned in the Sound. He was with the Scott expedition, way back.”

 

Cas hums, thoughtful. He looks out across the shelf, soft wonder playing openly across his expression, and Dean stands side-on to the horizon, oblivious to the dark expanse of the sky and the cold glitter of the ice. His eyes are on Castiel: face framed by the fur lining of his hood, the tip of his nose red with cold, his hair tufty beneath his hat.

 

Out of nowhere, Castiel says, “I’m autistic.”

 

Dean blinks.

 

Castiel goes on, without waiting for a reply, “Anna says that I don’t need to tell people—she says people can usually work it out on their own—but I just wanted to make sure you knew.”

 

“Okay,” Dean says. “Cool.” He hesitates. “Thanks for, uh—” He doesn’t want to say thanks for telling me, like it was something he needed to know and bear in mind when deciding whether he wanted to hang out with Castiel. He says instead, “Thanks for trusting me with that.”

 

Castiel pushes his hands into the pockets of his coat. “I’m just not good at talking to people.”

 

Dean nudges him with his elbow. “I like talking to you.”

 

“You’re fine,” Castiel allows, and Dean smiles. “I like you better than your friends.”

 

“That’s ‘cause I’m cooler and funnier and better-looking than those assholes.”

 

“I agree,” Castiel says earnestly, looking over at him, and Dean’s heart does some rom-com bullshit that he will deny until the day he dies, warmth blossoming beneath his ribs.

 

He can’t think of a single intelligent thing to say in response to that, and so like a dick, like a fucking teenager, he just stands there, getting more and more flustered by the second, and his brain spins with, _I think you’re great—do you wanna make out with me later—you are as hot as Antarctica is cold—_ and the desire, of all fucking things, to hit Cas with some goddamn finger-guns.

 

Mercifully, Castiel saves Dean from himself; his eyes move past Dean’s face, and he suddenly points, and says, “The Pleiades.”

 

Dean raises his eyebrows. “Come again?”

 

“There.” Castiel gestures more emphatically with his pointed finger, and Dean turns to follow. “The Pleiades—a star cluster. Your one o’clock.”

 

Dean squints up at the sky—without luck. “Uhhh.”

 

Castiel grumbles, but changes tack. “Alright. First of all, do you see that line of three stars close beside each other? That’s Orion’s belt. He’s upside down, here. And then, straight down from the star of the far right of the belt—that’s Betelgeuse.”

 

“Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse,” Dean says.

 

Castiel looks at him with a frown, his hand hanging in the air between them.

 

Dean grins. “You seen Beetlejuice?”

 

Understanding flickers across Cas’ face, and one corner of his mouth tilts up.  “Anna loves that movie,” he says, smiling, and he looks back up at the sky. “If only it were so easy—if I could summon a red giant with three words, it would make my work infinitely easier. Then again,” he carries on, matter-of-fact, as he tips his head to one side, “the inevitable consumption of all life on Earth into flame and destruction would be an inconvenience, so.”

 

Dean laughs.

 

Castiel’s hands jitter at his sides, fingers curling reflexively. It catches Dean’s attention, so he looks—and then Castiel ducks his head. “Sorry,” he says. His hand tightens into a fist, becoming abruptly still.

 

“Hey, it’s fine,” Dean says. “You do you.”

 

Castiel looks at him. He relaxes. He touches Dean’s arm, gently, just above the elbow, and then his hand drops away.

 

“So,” Dean says. “I’ve got Betelgeuse. Now where am I going?”

 

“Pan across to find Orion’s shield—a curve of five or six stars,” Castiel instructs, and he is watching as Dean lifts a finger to map across the sky, and then: “No, further—try three finger-widths.” His hand finds Dean’s, unfolding his fingers from a fist, and he steers him. “Parallel to Betelgeuse. Can you see it?”

 

Dean is having trouble focusing on anything but the touch of Castiel’s hand, the careful pressure of his fingers, the warmth of him tangible even through their gloves. He swallows, make a concerted effort to concentrate on the stars. He follows Cas’ instructions and he finds, there, at the edge of his glove, a dim curve of stars. “Yeah,” Dean says. “I see it.” His breath curls whitely from his mouth.

 

Slowly, Castiel shifts to stand at Dean’s shoulder, close enough that Dean can feel the warmth of him. His fingers flex on Dean’s hand, slide distractedly down to his wrist. “Connect the dots,” he says. His voice has dropped low, quiet. Dean has to tilt back to hear him properly, and he finds his shoulder pressed into Castiel’s solid chest. “That star at the bottom of the shield, that’s Pi-6. Draw a line from the edge of Orion’s belt, through Pi-6, and keep going.”

 

With Castiel’s fingers gentle on his wrist, Dean traces a wobbly, hesitant line across the darkness. “When do I stop?”

 

“You’re looking for a small cluster of blue stars. A little bigger than your thumbnail.”

 

“My thumbnail?” Dean repeats incredulously.

 

Castiel hums, soft, in his throat. “All close together. With the naked eye, you can only see five or so. They all formed from the same nebula, so gravity holds them together even when the rest of the natural forces in space are pulling them apart.” He pauses for a moment. “I always think they look somewhat lumpy.”

 

“Lumpy cluster,” Dean says. “Got it.”

 

Castiel huffs a laugh; Dean feels his breath, warm, against his ear and jaw.

 

As Dean scans the sky, he suddenly picks out a dense cloud of tiny blue stars, haloed in a glowing light—a lumpy cluster, along Castiel’s trajectory—but he doesn’t immediately say that he’s found it. He breathes in the dizzying, perfect warmth of Castiel’s nearness, his fingers still grazing over Dean’s arm. Dean wants badly to be out of this bulky snow-jacket, to feel Castiel’s hand on his properly. He swallows.

 

“Hey,” he says. “I think I’ve got it.”

 

***

 

Dean packs layers upon layers. He packs spare socks and a spare balaclava, and his UV glasses for in case the sun makes a surprise appearance, and his double-skinned gloves. He packs a litre bottle of water and an insulation pack, and he folds a miniature first aid-kit into his spare thermal shirt, and he packs a tool-kit. He packs an aluminium emergency blanket.

 

Outside the dormitory window, the sky is a mural in muddy grey, visibility badly reduced as a Con-2 storm whirls through McMurdo. From Dean’s laptop speakers, Sam’s voice is fuzzy and a little broken, but he comes through clearly enough, although Dean has worked out a kind of schedule with the other building in 203 so that no-one else tries to use the internet during each other’s Skype time.

 

“So how many of you are going on this thing tomorrow?” Sam asks, his voice a little garbled around something he’s eating. It’s been hard to understand him at times, as he talked through how his research was going, how winter meant that he would mostly be monitoring on-going experiments rather than starting anything new, how he was glad he’d ordered a load of new books in on the last plane before he had to stare down the next six months with nothing to do to entertain himself. It’s good to hear his voice either way, even slurred around a chicken sandwich or whatever healthy bullshit he’s got going on.

 

“There’s gonna be four of us,” Dean answers. “It’s gonna be me, Alicia, Cas, and Crowley.”

 

There is the amplified and faintly gross sound of Sam chewing, swallowing, and Dean pulls a face. “Cas?” Sam asks. “Is that the new guy you started telling me about last week? Cas-teel?”

 

Dean falters in folding up his clothes into his backpack. “Um,” he says. “Castiel. But yeah.”

 

“He okay?”

 

“Yeah, he’s fine. Why wouldn’t he be?”

 

“You never mentioned him in your emails, is all. I figured he must be some kind of asshole.”

 

“Um. No, he’s—he’s not an asshole.” Dean is fervently grateful for the lack of video as he feels his face and ears begin prickling hotly. “He’s fine.”

 

“Oh,” Sam says, long and slow, and it’s the most loaded sound that Dean has ever heard from him. “Oh, okay. Okay. I see.”

 

“Shut up,” Dean grouches. “It’s not like that.”

 

“I didn’t say anything,” Sam says. “You’re the one who—”

 

“Shut up, Sam,” Dean says. “Jesus.”

 

“Wow, he must be great.”

 

Dean fidgets. “He’s pretty cool,” he admits, feeling like a thirteen-year-old girl and a total fucking dork. “Whatever. Anyway, it’s gonna be me, Cas, Alicia, Aaron, and Crowley, out there for five days. We’ve got a bunch of telescope components that we gotta stick in the ice in a few different places, so we’ll be moving around a whole lot.”

 

Mercifully, Sam recognises a topic change when he sees one, and he lets it slide. “You’re gonna be on the plateau, right?”

 

“Yeah,” Dean says, distracted, as he moves around the room to grab his toothbrush and toothpaste. “Over towards the Pensacola range.”

 

Sam hums; the noise is quietly disapproving. “Well, be careful out there. The weather’s a little unpredictable at the minute.”

 

“Hey, when am I not careful?”

 

“I’m serious, Dean. People die out there all the time.”

 

Dean rolls his eyes. “You want me to send you the risk assessment procedures, Sammy? Because it’s up of twenty pages long. We’re gonna be fine.” He balls up an extra pair of spare socks, just as a precaution, and tosses them into his backpack from three feet away. He misses. “You think I’ll be able to swing by and see you on the way back?”

 

Sam laughs. “I wish, man.”

 

“I could go AWOL. Steal a skidoo and make a run for it.”

 

“Now that I would love to see.”

 

There is a short, shrill beep from Dean’s watch; he glances down and sees the screen flashing dully for attention. “Shit. That’s time-out.”

 

“For real?” Shuffling sounds scratch across the line as Sam moves. “I thought I had you ‘til quarter-to.”

 

“Usually, yeah. I had to share time tonight with Alicia—her brother’s got an operation tomorrow, so she wanted to check in before he goes under.”

 

“That’s rough. Good luck to Alicia’s brother, then. And best wishes to her, too, if she’s worried.”

 

“Yeah, I’ll pass it on. She’ll appreciate that. You say hi to your guys for me, too.” Dean pauses in packing for the expedition to sit at his desk, jiggling his mouse to get his laptop to wake up. “I’m gonna have to leave you for now. I’ll email you soon as I get back, okay?”

 

“Thanks. You take care out there, okay?”

 

“Yeah, yeah. You take care in your fancy sci-fi space centre, too.”

 

Sam snorts. “Okay. Speak to you later, Dean.”

 

“Bye, Sam.”

 

Dean’s mouse hovers over the hang-up button for Skype, but as usual—as always—he doesn’t click. He holds onto the next few seconds, the sound of Sam breathing, the scrape and clatter of Sam’s own mouse on the other end as he goes to end the call, and then the silence comes on too quickly, too abruptly.

 

Slowly, he exhales. He lets the familiar ache of missing his brother settle into its natural place beneath his ribs.

 

It’s been a really long time.

 

Dean reaches across his desk to find the picture of him, Sam, and his mom at the Grand Canyon. It’s creased down the middle where it used to be folded into his wallet. He folds it, now, along the same line, and tucks it inside his map-case.

 

***

Six A.M. McMurdo is silent and dark. The back of the Crary labs are illuminated by the hot, harsh glare of the floodlights, and by the gentler yellow wash of truck headlights as Dean and Victor carry equipment out of their workshop to carefully load up. Overhead, the sky is cold, starless. Condition-3.

 

Off to one side, Castiel stands, hunched, with his hands deep in his pockets, his fur-lined hood pulled forwards. His goggles rest on his brow, and he squints through the slow drift of a light snowfall. He watches, out of the way, as Dean straps all the telescope components down safely onto the truck’s flatbed.

 

As Dean passes Castiel, he slows. “Look alive, grumpy,” he says, and he reaches out to pinch the edge of Castiel’s hood between forefinger and thumb, tugs gently on it. “Don’t tell me you’re cold already.”

 

“I’m not cold,” Castiel objects.

 

Dean grins.

 

Alicia walks briskly back and forth to pack her own gear—a lot more lightweight than Castiel’s, as she can carry the entirety of her ice-core testing equipment under one arm—and then calls across to Castiel to lend her a hand with the rest of their expedition gear. They pack their tents, snowshoes, food, first-aid kits, emergency beacons; over by the second truck, Donna is helping Victor to push a skidoo up the ramp onto the back of the truck, while Aaron calls out semi-helpful instructions from where he is silhouetted in the red glow of the truck’s tail-lights.

 

It takes less than twenty minutes for them to get everything loaded. Victor checks that everything is secure; Donna glances over the winter-proofing for the two trucks and declares them road-ready. They run through the expedition plan—one day’s travel; three days work; one day back—and when they’ll radio in to report progress—when they hit base camp, and then every day at noon and at six P.M, Christchurch local time, and before they set off—and what to do if anything goes wrong.

 

“Relax, Donna,” Dean says, smiling bright and easy, and he reaches over the lip of the truck’s flat-bed to drum his gloved fingers against the emergency beacon, glowing faintly orange in the beam of the floodlights overhead. “Nothing is gonna go wrong.”


End file.
